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Matty Matheson

Review by Laura Hutson Hunter

Matty Matheson doesn’t have to tell you that Matty Matheson: Soups, Salads, Sandwiches isn’t your typical cookbook. You’ll know just by looking at it. The charismatic chef, restaurateur and actor (he consistently steals scenes as Neil Fak in the FX series The Bear) is dressed down in a worn-to-the-point-of-translucency Grateful Dead T-shirt on the book’s cover, tattoos scattered across every bit of skin up to his slicked-back yet still rumpled hair. The simple bowl of tomato soup in front of him looks practically conformist by comparison, and shows that the unfussy nature of his cooking is a byproduct of authentically good taste, not pretension. Matheson seems incapable of faking it, and his audience loves him for it. This isn’t his first cookbook—in fact, it’s his third—but by limiting recipes to three of the most user-friendly, indispensable meals, this one might become his most popular. The section on soups includes more ways to make the dish than I knew existed, including a fish stew called cioppino and a Scottish soup called Cullen skink. (“This soup should make you feel good, like you’re the one last remaining Highlander,” writes Matheson. “You’ve cut everyone’s head off, and you can finally just live your life.”) There are various chowders, phos and vichyssoises, but it’s simple stuff like Matheson’s corn maple Parmesan soup, which is made in a blender with frozen corn, that really highlights his enthusiasm for no-frills tasty food.

Matty Matheson’s new cookbook highlights the chef’s (and The Bear actor’s) unfussy nature and enthusiasm for no-frills tasty food.
NonfictionWomen's HistoryMusicLiteratureHistoryFood & DrinkBlack HistoryBiographyAmerican History

The 12 best biographies of 2024

List by Editors
STARRED REVIEW
December 11, 2024

The 12 best biographies of 2024

Throughout 2024, biographies consistently stole the show. From renowned authors to heads of state, game-changing activists and cultural icons, these 12 illuminating profiles delighted and inspired us.
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Ira Gershwin

By Michael Owen

Michael Owen’s thoughtful, engaging biography illuminates the life and work of Ira Gershwin.

Michael Owen’s thoughtful, engaging biography illuminates the life and work of Ira Gershwin.

The Icon and the Idealist

By Stephanie Gorton

The Icon and the Idealist is a compelling, warts-and-all dual biography of the warring leaders of the early 20th-century birth control movement: Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett.

The Icon and the Idealist is a compelling, warts-and-all dual biography of the warring leaders of the early 20th-century birth control movement: Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett.

Survival Is a Promise

By Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Audre Lorde gets her flowers in Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Survival Is a Promise, a masterful, poetic biography of the literar and feminist icon.

Audre Lorde gets her flowers in Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Survival Is a Promise, a masterful, poetic biography of the literar and feminist icon.

Night Flyer

By Tiya Miles

With the exquisite Night Flyer, Tiya Miles looks at Harriet Tubman from an entirely new perspective: her spirituality.

With the exquisite Night Flyer, Tiya Miles looks at Harriet Tubman from an entirely new perspective: her spirituality.

Loving Sylvia Plath

By Emily Van Duyne

Unearthed letters from Sylvia Plath may have shocked the world in 2017, but Loving Sylvia Plath shows we’ve long had all the evidence we needed to condemn her abuser, poet Ted Hughes.

Unearthed letters from Sylvia Plath may have shocked the world in 2017, but Loving Sylvia Plath shows we’ve long had all the evidence we needed to condemn her abuser, poet Ted Hughes.

Ascent to Power

By David L. Roll

Ascent to Power is a carefully crafted biography that superbly captures the presidency of Harry S. Truman.

Ascent to Power is a carefully crafted biography that superbly captures the presidency of Harry S. Truman.

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Throughout 2024, biographies consistently stole the show. From renowned authors to heads of state, game-changing activists and cultural icons, these 12 illuminating profiles delighted and inspired us.
Science Fiction & FantasyNonfictionMystery & SuspenseTravelPop CultureMysteryLiteratureLifestylesFantasyCrafts, Hobbies & Home

5 gifts that will shoot to the top of any reader’s TBR

Feature by Julie Hale

Book Nooks

The question of how best to set up a personal library has confounded many a book collector. When it comes time to arrange them, all those wonderful volumes can seem like the pieces of an unsolvable puzzle. The literature lover who’s searching for solutions will welcome Book Nooks: Inspired Ideas for Cozy Reading Corners and Stylish Book Displays by Vanessa Dina and Claire Gilhuly.

Packed with easy-to-execute design schemes and Antonis Achilleos’ fabulous photographs, Book Nooks offers tips on how to group books according to color and size, as well as strategies for using personal effects in an arrangement. For establishing a comfy reading area, there are options to suit every style, space and taste. The book also addresses the art of stacking (Yes, it can be a creative act!), suggests methods for bringing plants into the picture, organizing those prize cookbooks and integrating analog reading material into a teen’s room. With reading recs from noted authors and a look at Little Free Libraries, Book Nooks is a bibliophile’s best friend.

Hidden Libraries

DC Helmuth’s Hidden Libraries: The World’s Most Unusual Book Depositories is a perfectly on-point present for any reader, but especially one who loves to travel. This wide-ranging title profiles 50 remarkable libraries in locations across the globe. Staff stories, fascinating facts, spectacular imagery and a foreword from critic and librarian Nancy Pearl make it a winning tribute to the mission of libraries everywhere.

Hidden Libraries surveys a range of amazing physical spaces. The Kurkku Fields’ Underground Library in Kisarazu, Japan, is a book-lined grotto covered in grass, while the cocoon-shaped Heydar Aliyev International Airport Library near Baku, Azerbaijan, projects sheer architectural awesomeness. Examples of inspired resourcefulness regarding book circulation abound: In China, the Shenzhen library system distributes titles via vending machine. And Helmuth doesn’t dismiss even the most miniature of libraries. A handsome wooden cabinet filled with colorful books, the Little Free Library at the South Pole—startling against Antarctica’s unrelieved whiteness—seems to defy its frozen surroundings. Big or small, grand or humble, each library serves as a singular point of enrichment and connection, and Helmuth’s stirring volume honors these efforts.

The Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge

With its quick-witted heroine Rory Gilmore, a voracious reader with dreams of attending Harvard, Gilmore Girls could very well be classified as a TV show for bookworms. The series, which aired from 2000 to 2007, made numerous allusions (339, to be exact) to books of all genres—titles favored by Rory and her friends. In The Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge: The Official Guide to All the Books, Erika Berlin explores the novels, plays and poetry cited on the show, providing episode information and details on who read what. 

Inspired by Buzzfeed’s 2014 list of all the books mentioned in Gilmore Girls, Berlin’s breezy volume takes a nostalgic look back at Rory’s world while sharing reading recommendations (Frankenstein, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, One Hundred Years of Solitude, the list goes on) and invaluable book-related advice, including approaches for becoming a more focused reader and easy ways to impose order on a chaotic book collection. Filled with photos from the show, this book is a sunny retrospective and a buoyant tribute to the reading life.

Buried Deep and Other Stories

For the fantasy fan, there’s no better gift than Buried Deep and Other Stories by Naomi Novik, bestselling author of the Scholomance trilogy, Uprooted and Spinning Silver. As this collection proves, Novik is a natural conjurer whose stories—rich with allusion and detail—feel effortlessly authentic. Each provides an escape into an alternative world that’s wholly realized. 

“Dragons & Decorum”—a fantastical recasting of Pride and Prejudice, set in the Regency England of Novik’s Temeraire series—finds Elizabeth Bennet riding a winged dragon named Wollstonecraft. In “The Long Way Round,” Novik offers a taste of her next work (tentatively titled Folly) and introduces spirited protagonist Intessa Roh. “Vici,” another Temeraire tale, but this time set in ancient Rome, chronicles the unexpected camaraderie that arises between Marc Antony and a valiant dragon. Introductions from Novik accompany the anthology’s 13 stories, and readers will relish the context they give to her work. This is a transportive collection from an author who maps her narrative milieus with extraordinary precision.

The Man in Black and Other Stories

Crime fiction maven Elly Griffiths is known as a prolific writer, having penned the Ruth Galloway, Harbinder Kaur and Brighton mysteries series. But did anyone suspect she was writing short stories on the side? That’s right—Griffiths has long played around with short-form work, and her intriguing new volume, The Man in Black and Other Stories, spotlights this aspect of her artistry. 

The atmospheric anthology brings together 19 pieces, in which, fans will be delighted to learn, Griffiths expands the backstories of some of her most popular characters. The volume’s eponymous story is a spooky sketch set just before Halloween that features Ruth Galloway. “Harbinger” tracks Harbinder Kaur’s all-too-eventful first day at Shoreham Criminal Investigation Department. And in “Ruth Galloway and the Ghost of Max Mephisto,” all three of Griffiths’ sleuths converge, as it were. Ingeniously plotted and leavened with humor, the pieces are brief but satisfying. From sinister tales to twisty whodunits, Griffith’s short stories deliver as much spellbinding suspense as a full-blown novel.

Got a serious bibliophile on your list? Tick that box with one of these titles.
NonfictionLiteratureBiography

Didion and Babitz

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

In her introduction to Didion and Babitz, Lili Anolik lays out her plan: “What this book attempts to do: See Joan Didion plainly; see Eve Babitz plainly. Except Joan Didion can’t be seen plainly,” only “through a glass darkly. Eve Babitz is that glass.”

Babitz, born in 1943, was a child of Hollywood. Her father was a violinist for movie studios, her godfather was Igor Stravinsky. At 20, she made waves for posing nude with Marcel Duchamp as the two played chess. Though she wanted to be an artist and design album covers, she’s remembered for her memoir and short stories recounting the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll scene of early-1970s Los Angeles. But Babitz’s drug-fueled lifestyle got in her way, and her writing was largely forgotten until Anolik got to know her in 2012. Anolik’s profile for Vanity Fair and a 2019 biography, Hollywood’s Eve, sparked a resurgence of interest in Babitz’s writing. 

After Babitz died in 2021, Anolik stayed in touch with Babitz’s sister, Mirandi, who invited Anolik to examine the writer’s collection of letters. Anolik found one of particular interest: an unsent 1972 letter from Babitz to her friend Joan Didion. By turns earnest and angry, it sets up Babitz and Didion not as merely friends but as writerly rivals; Babitz chides Didion for dismissing Virginia Woolf and, Babitz claims, wanting to write like a man. The revelation led Anolik to begin another book about Babitz, this time including Didion.

The resulting book draws on copious interviews with Babitz’s and Didion’s networks, and the archives of Didion, Babitz and a host of others. Didion and Babitz situates the two in the 1970s LA scene that both wrote about, following them to the end of their lives—they died within days of one another. It’s a lively recounting of freewheeling partier Babitz and ambitious “cool customer” Didion. Despite the title, the narrative is notably tilted towards Babitz, more grounded in her work and life than in Didion’s. Still, the book captures a period and a vibe, and the celebrity gossip alone will entertain any ’70s-curious reader. Like Babitz herself, Didion and Babitz is an engaging narrative that Didion fans may quibble with, but that situates the two writers as the prime chroniclers of 1970s LA. 

Lili Anolik’s Didion and Babitz is a freewheeling and engaging narrative about two iconic literary rivals and their world in 1970s Los Angeles.
NonfictionLiteratureBiography

Survival Is a Promise

Review by Catherine Hollis

How does one write a biography of a hurricane? And how could any biography capture the life and essence of Audre Lorde, the Black lesbian feminist poet and community builder? In Alexis Pauline Gumbs, herself a queer Black feminist poet and community activist, Lorde has found the perfect interlocutor. Gumbs’ writing is multilayered, poetic and beautiful, making this book more than a biography. It’s a meeting of two minds.

Gumbs foregrounds Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde in Lorde’s affinity with the natural world. She expounds upon the science of trees, whales, honeybees, particle physics, tectonic plates and more, and then poetically connects these sections to Lorde’s life. But this structure is more than metaphor: Gumbs shows how the poet created literal guides for survival. For example, the destructive force of hurricanes is a recurring theme throughout Lorde’s work. It serves to illuminate her passionate experiences with love and desire, and her rage at racist violence. But it also nods to her Afro Caribbean roots: As a baby, her father survived a deadly hurricane in Barbados. Lorde herself survived the devastation of Hurricane Hugo in Grenada, where she lived toward the end of her life.

Those less familiar with the school of Audre Lorde may know of her work through prose sound bites like “your silence will not protect you” and “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” In this biography, Gumbs shifts focus from Lorde’s feminist essays to her poetry, relying on verses to frame Lorde’s life, from her experience as a “speech-delayed” child in midcentury Harlem to her emergence as a central node in second-wave feminism. The importance of speech and the power of reading shapes Lorde’s experience from the beginning, and her debates about Black and white feminisms and lesbian identity in the 1970s and ’80s continue to inform intersectional and queer feminisms today.

Calling her subject “The Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother Audre Lorde,” Gumbs does not pretend to be an impartial observer, and the biography is all the better for it. Lorde’s body of work continues to nourish generations of poets and activists, particularly Black and queer feminists. While readers from these communities have joyous reason to celebrate the publication of this book, Survival Is a Promise bears an important and hopeful message for us all: Survival is a communal act of care.

Audre Lorde gets her flowers in Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Survival Is a Promise, a masterful, poetic biography of the literary and feminist icon.
NonfictionLiteratureBiography

Loving Sylvia Plath

Review by Phoebe Farrell-Sherman

It is well known that much of Sylvia Plath’s work comes to us altered by her husband, Ted Hughes. Everything published after her death bears his heavy-handed revision and redaction, from her most famous book of poems, Ariel, to her journals. The extent of Hughes’ influence, however, stretches beyond his management of her literary estate to even the basic facts we’re willing to believe about his relationship with Plath.

In 2017, newly surfaced letters from Plath to her longtime psychiatrist, Ruth Beuscher, made headlines. Plath wrote that Hughes’ physical violence had caused her to miscarry, and that Hughes had told her he wished she was dead. The Guardian called the letters “shocking,” and added an addendum from Hughes’ widow, Carol Hughes, that the “suggest[ion]” of abuse was “absurd . . . to anyone who knew Ted well.” Yet though the letters were new to the public, there were long-published existing accounts of Hughes’ abuse of Plath.

Stockton University professor and Fulbright recipient Emily Van Duyne wrote as much in an op-ed for Literary Hub that went viral, “Why Are We So Unwilling to Take Sylvia Plath at Her Word?” Loving Sylvia Plath is Van Duyne’s longer answer to that question, a deeply researched analysis of how the popular myth of Plath’s life, one that depicts her as an unreliable narrator and subordinates her poetry to her depression and her suicide, was constructed by Hughes and maintained by critics from the time of her death in 1963 to the present. The book examines how evidence of Hughes’ emotional and physical abuse has been repeatedly minimized, erased and outright dismissed by critics and scholars alike.

Van Duyne’s scope includes the cultural context in which Hughes’ narrative has thrived, bringing in philosophy of intimate partner violence, as well as reflecting on her own personal experiences with an abusive ex. A chapter is devoted to Assia Wevill, a translator of poet Yehuda Amichai and the woman Hughes left Plath for. Hughes didn’t just control Wevill’s story; he completely suppressed it after her death by suicide. Van Duyne also follows the writers who first endeavored to tell Plath’s story, particularly Harriet Rosenstein, who held on to Plath’s letters for almost half a century before trying to sell them in 2017.

Loving Sylvia Plath concludes with a note of caution about distorting Plath’s memory in a different way through the temptation to “restore” her from Hughes’ interference. That warning’s well-taken—for all the scholarship about her, we can’t expect to know Plath. But we can know her work, which is extraordinary. And, where it remains unaltered, we can take her at her word.

Unearthed letters from Sylvia Plath may have shocked the world in 2017, but Loving Sylvia Plath shows we’ve long had all the evidence we needed to condemn her abuser, poet Ted Hughes.
NonfictionLiterature

The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians

Review by Jessica Peng

If you’re reading this, you probably love books. You’ve probably stepped into a bookstore and felt an immediate rush of comfort, along with the thrill of getting to browse the bestsellers in your favorite genres, be it poetry or romance or biography. You might’ve grown up frequenting your local library, searching for obscure titles in the computer catalog or laughing at the absurd comments left in well-worn paperbacks. While most book fans are familiar with the experience of visiting bookstores, libraries and other delightful book places, few of us have had the privilege of discovering what goes on behind the scenes. 

That’s where The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians comes in. This project from internationally bestselling author James Patterson and frequent collaborator Matt Eversmann highlights dozens of dedicated, on-the-ground booksellers and librarians to give readers an inside look at the joys and challenges of working amid shelves of books. After taking the time to meet and interview industry experts from around the country, Patterson and Eversmann tell their stories in short, first-person vignettes. Readers will delight in the New York librarian championing literary programs in the prison complex on Rikers Island, the Barnes & Noble manager who started a young adult book club for teens and the independent bookstore owner who fell in love at the store she now runs. 

Of course, the stories in The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians are not all optimistic. Patterson and Eversmann’s heroes face a number of serious problems, from lack of funding to natural disasters to book bans. Although the featured booksellers and librarians handle conflict with competence and goodwill, it is clear that their efforts alone are not enough to save an industry that is threatened by political tension, monopolies and new technologies. The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians is an unique and enchanting work of nonfiction, but it’s also a call to action, a cry for communities to rally around their booksellers.

Patterson is well-known for the millions of dollars and years of work he has already poured into promoting access to literature. There is no better mouthpiece for this project. The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians is an homage to anyone who felt the tingle of magic that only comes with reading, and who made it their mission to share their love with everyone. The first thing you’ll do after reading this book is take a visit to your local bookstore or library!

The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians is a heartwarming celebration that will delight bibliophiles of all stripes.
NonfictionLiteratureBiography

Carson McCullers

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

The 1940 novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter established 23-year-old Carson McCullers as a talented new voice who conveyed through her characters the pain and loneliness of outsiders, misfits and oddballs seeking to be loved. Over the next 11 years, McCullers published two novels, a novella and collection of stories set in small Southern towns. When she died at 50, she left behind this small but powerful body of work and a record of what she once called her “sad, happy life.”

In her absorbing new biography, Carson McCullers: A Life, Mary V. Dearborn draws deeply on letters, the author’s unfinished autobiography and newly available archival materials, painting a colorful and finely detailed portrait of McCullers’ public and private lives. Born in 1917 in Columbus, Georgia, Lula Carson Smith grew up in a family she described as well-off, though not rich. As a child, McCullers and her mother recognized her many talents. “Marked out as special,” Dearborn writes, she “felt herself somehow outside the sphere of normal childhood,” a state McCullers would express in one of her earliest stories, “Wunderkind.”

McCullers was studying writing at New York University when she met Reeves McCullers in 1935. The two found an immediate attraction and soon married. Carson was bound and determined to become a writer, and Reeves believed she was destined for great things. But the marriage was always troubled, with the couple separating, remarrying and separating again, until Reeves died by suicide in 1953. Unlike Virginia Spencer Carr’s 1975 biography The Lonely Hunter—written without access to McCullers’ now-available letters and archives—Dearborn offers a candid and complex portrait of the author’s lifelong love and pursuit of women, especially older, more worldly women, documenting many of her relationships for the first time.

Dearborn, who has authored the biographies of Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller, among other writers, captures the way that McCullers alienated many artists—Eudora Welty called her “that little wretch Carson”—as well as the ways that others such as W.H. Auden, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams championed her. In the end, Dearborn notes, “We read Carson’s work today because she taps into the universal sense that we are not understood, not loved for ourselves. Carson provides confirmation that our common search means we are less alone.”

Dearborn weaves careful critical readings of McCullers’ writings with detailed descriptions of the author’s life, producing an exemplary critical biography of one of our greatest writers.

The absorbing Carson McCullers is the first to paint a full portrait of the author, showing acclaimed biographer Mary V. Dearborn at the height of her powers.
NonfictionMystery & SuspenseFictionChildren's & YAYATrue CrimePicture BookMysteryMusicMemoirLiteratureHistorical FictionComing of AgeBiography

Our Top 10 books of December 2023

List by the editors of BookPage
STARRED REVIEW

Our Top 10 books of December 2023

This month’s top titles include a chilling historical mystery from Ariel Lawhon and a ripsnorting true crime collection from Douglas Preston.
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Book jacket image for The Ferris Wheel by Tu¨lin Kozikoglu

A beautifully profound yet subtle story about refugees and global connection, The Ferris Wheel engages its text and illustrations in conversation, capturing the essence of

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Book jacket image for Gwen & Art Are Not in Love by Lex Croucher

Lex Croucher offers readers a quirky, queer Arthurian remix in which lighthearted, entertaining banter alternates with political machinations and intense battlefield scenes.

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Book jacket image for Happy by Celina Baljeet Basra

Happy’s unexpected climax is handled so masterfully that it seems, in retrospect, inevitable. The humanity underpinning this story will speak to anyone with a heart

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Book jacket image for The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon

Atmospheric, unique and elegantly written, The Frozen River will satisfy mystery lovers and historical fiction enthusiasts alike.

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Book jacket image for The Other Half by Charlotte Vassell

Charlotte Vassell’s blisteringly funny The Other Half is a murder mystery written a la Kingsley Amis.

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Book jacket image for Here in the Dark by Alexis Soloski

Theater critic Alexis Soloski’s debut thriller, Here in the Dark, is flawless from curtain up to curtain call.

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Book jacket image for Chasing Bright Medusas by Benjamin Taylor

Chasing Bright Medusas is an inspired biography of Willa Cather’s life and work that conveys the author’s complexity with affection and admiration.

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Book jacket image for Sonic Life by Thurston Moore

Thurston Moore’s long-awaited memoir offers a prismatic view on the sonic democracy that was Sonic Youth.

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Book jacket image for Gator Country by Rebecca Renner

Rebecca Renner’s Gator Country follows an undercover mission to expose alligator poachers in the Everglades, revealing the scraggly splendor of the region’s inhabitants.

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Book jacket image for The Lost Tomb by Douglas Preston

A haunting compendium of Douglas Preston’s true crime tales, The Lost Tomb delves into the shadowy uncertainty cloaking things that resist being brought to light.

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Audio

Notes from an Island

Orlagh Cassidy, Tove Jansson

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Listeners will be immersed in this meditative exploration of time spent in nature—the story of Moomin creator Tove Jansson and her partner Tooti Pietila’s life together on an island off the Gulf of Finland.
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All Reviews
This month’s top titles include a chilling historical mystery from Ariel Lawhon and a ripsnorting true crime collection from Douglas Preston.
NonfictionWomen's HistoryTrue CrimeNatureLiteratureHistory

3 wickedly entertaining books to give to mystery fans

Feature by Deborah Hopkinson

Gardening Can Be Murder  

Horticultural expert Marta McDowell has explored the links between writers and gardens in previous books about Beatrix Potter, Frances Hodgson Burnett and U.S. presidents. It’s only natural that she’s turned her attention to the ways in which gardens have played a role in mysteries. After all, she says, “In gardens, the struggle between life and death is laid bare.”

McDowell’s Gardening Can Be Murder is as full of delights as an English cottage garden in summer. McDowell explores the connection between gardens to mysteries from all sorts of angles (as any good detective would). She provides an overview of gardening detectives from classic to contemporary, beginning with Sergeant Cuff in Wilkie Collins’ 1868 thriller The Moonstone. Cuff is a “horticulturally inclined investigator” who dreams of retiring from catching thieves to grow roses. Naturally, McDowell includes Miss Jane Marple, who often makes use of gardening and bird-watching to inform her keen-witted observations of life—and death—in St. Mary Mead. 

McDowell discusses gardens as crime scenes, as well as gardens and flowers as motives. In a chapter playfully entitled “Means: Dial M for Mulch,” she recounts examples of the deadly use of garden implements in crime fiction. Poisons, of course, merit their own chapter, and McDowell also investigates authors such as Agatha Christie, who lovingly cared for the gardens of her country home, Greenway; Rex Stout, “an indoor plant whiz”; and contemporary author Naomi Hirahara, who writes the Japantown mystery series as well as books on Japanese American gardens.

Along with photos and period illustrations, the book is visually enhanced by Yolanda Fundora’s distinctive silhouette illustrations. As an added bonus, McDowell appends a reading list of plant-related mysteries, ranging from The Moonstone to 21st-century writer Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce series. It’s not always possible to garden in winter, so dig into this book and enjoy! 

★ The League of Lady Poisoners

Lisa Perrin, an illustrator who teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art, begins her highly entertaining and lavishly illustrated study of 25 female poisoners with this dedication: “For my parents, who really hoped my first book would be a nice children’s picture book.” And while The League of Lady Poisoners may not be for young children, it’s a sure bet that adults will eat up (pun intended) this original, thought-provoking and visually stunning book.

Perrin’s sense of color and design makes it a pleasure to simply turn the pages. The distinctive arsenic green on the eye-catching cover is used to excellent effect throughout, often as the sole color offsetting a stylized pen-and-ink illustration. For example, a skeleton with green bloodlines graces Perrin’s introduction to poisons, which includes a “toxic timeline” tracing the knowledge of plant poisons back to around 3000 BCE in ancient Egypt. There are also some gorgeous botanical illustrations of poisonous plants and creatures. (One can’t help wonder: Will they inspire some new nature-themed mysteries?)

Perrin organizes her profiles by the motives that led these women to perform their deadly deeds: money and greed, anger and revenge, and love and obsession. Each main subject appears as a full-page, color illustration, beginning with Locusta, a poison expert and assassin for hire in first-century Rome. 

While some names, such as Cleopatra, will be familiar to readers, Perrin’s well-documented research has unearthed little known stories including that of the women of Nagyrév, a small village in Hungary, who in the early 1900s sought to poison their abusive husbands with arsenic. With the aid of a midwife, the poisoning “epidemic” took hold, with at least 40 confirmed murders. Years later, when the police finally investigated, some women were sent to prison or executed while others women died by suicide to avoid such fates. 

Despite its gruesome subject matter, The League of Lady Poisoners is a beautiful book. And who knows? Perhaps Perrin will turn her attention to fictional poisoners next.

Murderabilia

Readers interested in the history of true crime will be fascinated by Harold Schechter’s clever new book, Murderabilia. The title refers to objects owned by killers or otherwise connected to their crimes—artifacts that are often sold on the internet in the present day. But as Schechter makes clear, this impulse to look at or collect grisly mementos has been around for a long time. 

Schechter brings a lifetime of research to this topic: He is Professor Emeritus at Queens College, where he has taught for four decades. Along with nonfiction works about serial killers, he’s also penned detective novels featuring Edgar Allan Poe and has a novelist’s sense of what makes a good story. And the stories here are good. As he uncovers the history of 100 grisly artifacts, Schechter provides a fascinating examination of the often unexpected and surprising ways in which crime has seeped into social history and popular culture. 

Schechter begins in 1808, with the tombstone of Naomi Wise, a North Carolina indentured servant who became pregnant by a clerk named Jonathan Lewis. Lewis promised to elope with Wise, but instead he strangled her. This sad tale was memorialized in the murder ballad “Little Omie”; in other words, we’re not the first to find the gruesome compelling.

Given the author’s deep familiarity with Poe, the master of the macabre makes an appearance here too, with Schechter linking one of Poe’s detective stories to the 1841 murder of Mary Rogers, a cigar girl. Schechter also details other kinds of murderabilia, including a hammer wielded by John Colt to murder a printer; a kind of bottled mineral water that nurse Jane Toppan laced with poison and used to kill 31 people; and a shovel used by serial killer H.H. Holmes.

Short chapters and copious illustrations make Murderabilia a great choice to leave on the night table to dip into before bed. Then again, given the subject matter, maybe not.

If you don’t have a clue what to get the true crime lovers and cozy mystery readers on your gift list, fear not—we’ve done the detecting for you.
NonfictionLiteratureHistoryEssaysCookbooks

4 inspired gifts for the literary minded

Feature by Julie Hale

In The Book of (More) Delights, poet and essayist Ross Gay continues the practice of recording everyday pleasures that made his 2019 volume, The Book of Delights, an award-winning bestseller. In Gay’s hands, the habit has become an exercise in ecstasy, a way to cultivate gratitude and develop a spirit of inquiry.   

Gay’s guidelines for compiling delights—“write them daily, write them quickly, and write them by hand”—has resulted in a collection of 81 essays that span a year. His newest enthusiasms (yellow jackets, Snoopy, paper menus) may seem simple at first glance, but they yield arresting complexities under his observant eye. Each piece in the book is a snapshot moment of relished experience that emphasizes discovery and revelation. 

Gay’s images are precise and poetic (garlic sprouts look like “little green periscopes”; a favorite spoon has “a slight impression—as though touched by an angel—on the handle”), and his reflections on aging, relationships and the passage of time are heartening. Informal yet inspired, off-the-cuff yet beautifully composed, his essays reveal the riches hidden in quotidian experience. With a reading list of works that have influenced Gay’s process, The Book of (More) Delights provides abundant avenues to appreciate our world.  

In his gem of a memoir, Bartleby and Me: Reflections of an Old Scrivener, Gay Talese takes stock of his working life as a journalist and author—a remarkable run of roughly seven decades. Now 91, Talese entered the business as a copy boy at the New York Times. Over the course of his career, he helped define contemporary nonfiction narrative through innovative magazine pieces and books like Honor Thy Father (1971), which featured the novelistic techniques of New Journalism. 

Bartleby and Me finds Talese focusing on his early years and inspirations, most notably his fascination with the “nobodies” of the world—figures reminiscent of Herman Melville’s reticent character Bartleby, who toil in obscurity and usually never make the news. These unassuming yet oddly intriguing individuals (to wit, “a seventy-eight-year-old grandfather’s clock of a man” named George Bannon, who rings the bell during boxing matches at Madison Square Garden) have long served as subject matter for his work.  

Talese also shares anecdotes related to writing and research and reconsiders classic works like his 1966 Esquire profile “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” For the most part, his backdrop is New York, and the volume reads as a tribute to the city as a place of endless evolution. Wistful, understated and urbane, Bartleby and Me is vintage Talese—the exemplary work of a gentleman journalist. 

Fans with an insatiable appetite for the mysteries of Martin Walker will savor Bruno’s Cookbook: Recipes and Traditions from a French Country Kitchen. Bruno Courreges, the clever, self-possessed hero of Walker’s popular series, serves as police chief for St. Denis, a rustic village in the Périgord region of southwestern France. Bruno is an exceptional detective and accomplished cook, and in each book in the series, the ritual of mealtime, whether it be a leisurely lunch or convivial dinner, proves to be an important component of his daily routine. 

Inspired by his gastronomic passion, Bruno’s Cookbook, which was co-authored by Walker and his wife, Julia Watson, has more than 90 recipes neatly categorized according to the suppliers of the ingredients, from the winemaker (le vigneron) to the fisherman (le pecheur). The volume is packed with handsome photos, insights into the food culture of the Périgord and dishes to please every palate, including intriguing menu items like Snails in Garlic and Butter, Bruno’s Meatballs with Garlic-Roasted Tomatoes and A Most Indulgent Chocolate Cake. (Of interest to the canine diner: a recipe for Balzac’s Best Dog Biscuits.) Easy-to-follow cooking instructions and copious Bruno-related anecdotes make this a delicious gift for the well-read epicure.

Transporting readers to the green moors of Yorkshire, The Wonderful World of James Herriot: A Charming Collection of Classic Stories provides a detailed portrait of the beloved veterinarian and author.

Herriot, whose real name was James Alfred Wight, published his first book, If Only They Could Talk, in 1970. In that volume, he adopted the narrative approach that made his work so popular, writing from a first-person perspective that blended fact and fiction as he detailed his rounds as a country veterinarian, all in a voice that was poetic, affable and expert. His subsequent books, including All Creatures Great and Small, served as the basis for two PBS TV series of the same name.

The Wonderful World of James Herriot is a sampler of stories from Herriot’s works with lively supplementary text by his children, Jim Wight and Rosie Page. Featuring chapters on Herriot’s career, family life and the Yorkshire region, it offers fresh perspectives on the man and his work. Herriot aficionados needn’t fret—Siegfried and Tristan Farnon put in plenty of appearances. Brimming with personal photos and enchanting illustrations, it’s a perfectly cozy collection from start to finish.

We’ve collected a quartet of treats for the bibliophiles on your list.
NonfictionLiteratureBiography

Chasing Bright Medusas

Review by Deborah Mason

It is often said that novelists find their best material in their own childhoods. In Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather, Benjamin Taylor convincingly argues that for Cather, this supposition is the key to fully appreciating her work. 

Taylor, an award-winning memoirist, novelist and biographer, freely admits his great affection and admiration for Cather and her writing. In this relatively short but well-researched biography, he conveys Cather’s complexity, her strengths and her frailties: headstrong and independent, but also easily hurt by a negative review; ruthlessly honest in her writing, but unable (or unwilling) to come to terms with her own sexuality and her love for Isabelle McClung Hamburg; clinging to her values and idealism, but also aware that humans are frail vessels. Many of Cather’s letters have recently come to light, and Taylor uses them sensitively and effectively to tell her story. The letters humanize her, revealing a woman of tremendous genius and touching vulnerability. 

Taylor is at his most convincing when he links Cather’s literary works—from her first articles to her final story—to her life. Very few authors have embedded their past so seamlessly and beautifully into their works as Willa Cather. Taylor draws direct lines between episodes in O Pioneers! and My &Aacutentonia to Cather’s childhood in Red Cloud, Nebraska. But he also shows how even her later, less obviously autobiographical works, such as The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop, are imbued with the experiences, observations and values she acquired over her lifetime. Taylor demonstrates that her books and stories are as much the product of the young Willa who moved from Winchester, Virginia, to Red Cloud at age 6 as they are of the 49-year-old novelist at the height of her powers. 

Not only is it a true delight to read these selections of Cather’s beautiful descriptions and wry observations of human nature, but her words seem to have truly inspired Taylor. His interpretations of the interplay of memory and description in Cather’s work are some of the most lyrical and moving passages in this highly polished and heartfelt book. 

Chasing Bright Medusas is an inspired biography of Willa Cather’s life and work that conveys the author’s complexity with affection and admiration.
NonfictionLiteratureBiography

A Mystery of Mysteries

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

It’s no accident that Mark Twain scholar Mark Dawidziak begins A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe with Poe’s mysterious death in 1849 at the age of 40. As Dawidziak reminds us throughout his ambitious, well-researched book, the circumstances of Poe’s death remain a topic of debate and conjecture, as much a part of the Poe mystique as his short, stormy life. “It is,” Dawidziak notes, “one of the great literary stage exits of all time,” and its notoriety has done much to keep Poe’s reputation alive, making him one of the most famous American authors of all time, with a pop culture following as well as a solid place in middle school and high school literary curricula.

Dawidziak adopts a clever—and appropriate—organizational approach, alternating chapters set in the last months of Poe’s life with chapters exploring his early family life, career and influences. Readers who know little of Poe’s origins may be surprised to learn that this quintessential American author spent part of his formative years abroad. Poe’s mother was a talented actor who died at the age of 24, leaving three children behind. Poe became the foster child of John and Fanny Allan (thus his middle name), who, during the War of 1812, moved to England, where Poe spent five years soaking up impressions of old houses and graveyards that fed his literary imagination.

Throughout the book, Dawidziak draws readers into the mystery of Poe’s death, which occurred shortly after he was found wandering the streets of Baltimore, Maryland, delirious and disheveled. Dawidziak, of course, has a favorite theory about the likely cause, gleaned from the various opinions of medical experts, Poe scholars, historians, horror specialists and others—but it would spoil the mystery to reveal it here. Nonetheless, his argument demonstrates one of the pleasures of Dawidziak’s excellent book: his ability to weave quotations from Poe together with first-person observations from Poe’s 19th-century contemporaries and commentary by modern experts. In this way, Dawidziak’s biography reaches beyond the myth of Poe to reveal the actual man and writer, all while painting a vivid picture of the era in which he lived. A Mystery of Mysteries makes possible a deeper appreciation of a complicated, often troubled author whose success after death surpassed anything he knew in life.

Mark Dawidziak’s biography of Edgar Allan Poe reaches beyond the myth of his troubled life and mysterious death to reveal the actual man and writer.

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