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What to read this Halloween, based on your ideal spooky activity

Whether you’re a homebody or a thrill-hunter, we’ve got a seasonal, spine-tingling read for you.
Whether you’re a homebody or a thrill-hunter, we’ve got a seasonal, spine-tingling read for you.
NonfictionLifestylesCookbooks

Bodega Bakes

In the personable Bodega Bakes, pastry chef Paola Velez presents just that: sweets that can be made solely from the ingredients found at a corner store.
In the personable Bodega Bakes, pastry chef Paola Velez presents just that: sweets that can be made solely from the ingredients found at a corner store.
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Nuclear Folly

Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy considers the many instances when Cuba and the U.S. got things wrong during the Cuban missile crisis.
Nonfiction

North by Shakespeare

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

In his entertaining new work, North by Shakespeare: A Rogue Scholar’s Quest for the Truth Behind the Bard’s Work, bestselling author and investigative journalist Michael Blanding digs deep into the world of Shakespearean scholarship. He chronicles the tireless research of Dennis McCarthy, an outsider in academia, about links between Shakespeare’s plays and the writings of Sir Thomas North, a member of Queen Elizabeth’s court.

Blanding first met McCarthy in October of 2015, at a dinner reception after a lecture. Readers’ first reaction to McCarthy’s beliefs may be similar to Blanding’s: dismay at the prospect of yet another conspiracy theory about the true author behind Shakespeare’s work.

Yet there are certainly many mysteries about Shakespeare’s life that have given rise to speculation—for example, “how a glover’s son from Stratford could have had the intimate knowledge of Italy” apparent in his plays. McCarthy’s theory seeks to explain such discrepancies. He doesn’t believe the plays’ authorship belongs to the aristocratic North, however. Rather, he thinks Shakespeare borrowed specific phrasings, plot lines and scenes from North’s published and unpublished writings.

Blanding’s energetic narrative traces McCarthy’s search for more of North’s writings and his use of plagiarism software to provide evidence for their influence on Shakespeare. He also delves into Tudor history, illuminating North’s life as a traveler and aristocrat. Along the way, Blanding considers “what it takes to change established ways of thinking” within academic communities.

It’s unclear if Blanding’s highly enjoyable foray into the field will have an impact on Shakespearean scholars, but at the very least, North by Shakespeare will provide readers with the tools to enter the fray themselves. The book includes McCarthy’s estimated timeline of North’s plays next to a timeline of Shakespeare’s work, which readers can use along with McCarthy’s other techniques to examine passages from both North and Shakespeare themselves. It’s almost as much fun as sitting in a theater.

Michael Blanding’s deep dive into the world of Shakespearean scholarship is almost as much fun as sitting in a theater.
NonfictionLiterature

Lolita in the Afterlife

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Vladimir Nobokov’s Lolita is one of the most beloved and most maligned novels ever written. Is it a work of literary genius or unrepentant smut? A madman’s confession or a justification for pedophilia? A sendup of American provincialism or a shocking depiction of the dark human soul? It could—and has—been argued that it is all these things. The heated dialogue that began when the book roared onto bestseller lists more than 60 years ago continues to burn today, deepening the conundrum of the book, the girl and the dangerously charming protagonist, Humbert Humbert. 

Publisher Walter Minton introduced Lolita to a wide readership when he released the book in America in 1958. Minton took his knocks for this bold decision, but he also made a fortune from it. His daughter Jenny Minton Quigley was born long after Lolita’s splashy arrival, but she still grew up under its shadow, with some ambivalence. Now an editor herself, she recently found herself contemplating the book’s place in our more socially conscious age, marked in particular by the #MeToo movement. And so Quigley assembled Lolita in the Afterlife, an engrossing collection of smart and thoughtful essays by an array of contemporary writers reckoning with this indelible and shocking novel.

The contributors, mostly women but with a handful of men as well, hold up Lolita like a prism, examining it in different lights and from a range of angles. Tapping her own conflicted reaction to the novel, Roxane Gay examines whether there are boundaries she and her fellow writers should not cross, while Susan Choi and Bindu Bansinath connect their own intimate adolescent sexual experiences to the text. Biographer Stacy Schiff and literary historian Sarah Weinman offer some fascinating historical context, and screenwriter Tom Bissell watches film adaptations of the novel with fresh eyes. Novelists Andre Dubus III and Jim Shepard (who, incidentally, taught Lolita to Quigley in college) provide 21st-century male perspectives, while Alexander Chee juxtaposes Lolita’s story against his own sexual coming-of-age as a gay man. 

A number of books about Nabokov and Lolita have been published in the last few years, but Lolita in the Afterlife seems to be the first to wholly reassess the work’s legacy as our society grapples with the harm caused by white male privilege and the age-old propensity to look the other way. All tallied, the book’s 30 essays (as well as Quigley’s own incisive introduction) are, by necessity, contradictory, bracing, uncomfortable, thought provoking, informative, entertaining and, in the end, inconclusive—not unlike Lolita itself. Perhaps Lauren Groff says it best in her essay “Delectatio Morosa” when she calls Nabokov’s troublesome masterpiece “a paradox . . . unparalleled as a profane and dirty and gorgeous mirror of America.”

Is Lolita a work of literary genius or unrepentant smut? A madman’s confession or justification for pedophilia? These essays wholly reassess this masterpiece's legacy.

Girlhood

Anyone raised as a girl will be able to relate to something in Girlhood, and those who weren’t will marvel at this book’s eye-opening, transformative perspective.
NonfictionMemoirEuropean History

Eva and Eve

Review by Alice Cary

After Julie Metz’s mother died in 2006, she mused, “I wish like hell I’d asked my mother more questions.” That’s a common regret of newly bereaved daughters, but this one had special urgency: Metz had just discovered “a vault of secrets” tucked away in her mother’s lingerie drawer. A small keepsake book contained childhood notes and souvenirs from Vienna, the Austrian city from which Metz’s mother, Eva, and grandparents were forced to flee in 1940. Their Jewish family had been wrenched apart two years earlier when Eva’s two older brothers were sent to London because a neighbor’s son, who had joined the Hitler Youth, had begun targeting them. By 1940, London was no longer an option for the rest of the family, so they headed to the United States. Once there, 12-year-old Eva changed her name to Eve and grew up to become a “steely, savvy” New Yorker, as well as a successful art director at Simon & Schuster.

Metz had known about this tragic saga from a young age, but her hunt for additional details after her mother’s death turned into an obsession that “felt like a séance, a conversation she and I never had when she was alive. A collaboration with a ghost.” The result is her intriguing memoir, Eva and Eve: A Search for My Mother’s Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind.

The author is no stranger to digging into the past. Metz’s 2009 memoir, Perfection, reexamined her marriage after she discovered that her recently deceased husband had been a serial adulterer. In Eva and Eve, her research leads her to Vienna, where she visits her mother’s childhood apartment and tours the factory her grandfather, Julius Singer, was forced to abandon. Singer invented an accordionlike paper used to dispense medicine that was manufactured on a “machine so complicated that the Nazis had kept Julius alive to run it.” These visits are fascinating as well as heartbreaking. As Metz retraces her mother’s journey to America, readers come to understand in a visceral, immediate way the hardships and terrors her family faced. 

Metz is a dogged, careful researcher, but at times she describes imagined scenes, with mixed success. Many of these passages vividly bring her ancestors to life, but a few seem like a stretch. Still, Metz is a compelling narrator who offers thoughtful reflections on how her family’s situation parallels today’s world. “I wondered about all the other Evas, children forced to leave their countries because of war and drought, riding the Bestia train through Mexico, or waiting in refugee camps in the Mideast and Europe,” she writes. “When those who have suffered persecution feel that they belong, that their lives truly matter, we will all live more truthful lives.”

After Julie Metz discovered “a vault of secrets” in her mother’s lingerie drawer, she went searching for information about her family's prewar life in Austria.
NonfictionMemoirFamily & Relationships

Blow Your House Down

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

There is pain in every divorce story, but not every divorce story can be related by a narrator as capable as Gina Frangello. Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason, Frangello’s raw, eloquent account of the demise of her marriage, is an exemplar of self-reflection, tinged with optimism about the power to recover one’s life from the depth of suffering.

Long before she reached her 18th wedding anniversary in 2011, Frangello was acutely aware of “the signs you are not living the right life for you, even if your life looks unfathomably pretty and privileged compared to where you come from or in other people’s eyes.” And so she began a long-distance emotional affair with a writer and rock musician whose novel she was publishing, culminating in a full-blown relationship she concealed from her husband for nearly three years.

Like many divorces, Frangello’s mutated from the early hope of relative amicability to the ugly reality of bitter conflict, as a husband who had trouble curbing his public displays of anger even in happier times set out to inflict maximum pain for her transgression. As the warfare escalated, Frangello faced the task of caring for her aging parents and underwent seven months of treatment for breast cancer.

Amid this account of Job-like affliction, Frangello never shirks responsibility for the breakup. Still, casting her ordeal in the form of a trial, she makes a passionate case from an ardently feminist perspective for the rightness of her decision to abandon her husband for “the man who rewired my heart” and pleads that her effort to rebuild her children’s trust be “judged by the courts of distance and hindsight.”

For all her undeniable current happiness, Frangello resists the urge to affix a happy ending to her story. Instead, she offers only a “vow to continue unfolding for as long as I breathe.” Considering all the heartbreak she has endured and the uncertainty of life she knows all too well, that modest hope seems entirely fitting.

There is pain in every divorce story, but not every divorce story can be related by a narrator as capable as Gina Frangello.

The Code Breaker

Like Lab Girl on steroids, The Code Breaker paints a detailed picture of how Nobel Prize-winning scientist Jennifer Douda works.
NonfictionHistoryBlack History

Hot, Hot Chicken

Review by Matt Gifford

If you’ve been following Nashville’s meteoric rise to It City status, you’ve surely heard about its famous hot chicken—fried chicken smothered with enough cayenne pepper to make your ears smoke. As the legend goes, in the early 20th century, a jilted lover overspiced Thornton Prince III’s chicken to punish him for his ramblin’ ways. This revenge backfired, however, because Prince loved the taste and eventually founded a successful restaurant based on the recipe, which his family still operates today.

Native Nashvillians and tourists alike have come to know and love this delicacy over the last decade, but members of Music City’s Black community have been braving the spice for generations. No matter when you learned about this iconic fare, Rachel Louise Martin’s Hot, Hot Chicken: A Nashville Story will enlighten you about its complex past.

This isn’t a recipe book, nor is it merely a culinary history of the spicy dish. In Hot, Hot Chicken, Martin traces Prince’s lineage back to the Civil War, illustrating the experiences of Black people in antebellum Tennessee along the way. She outlines how Prince’s grandparents were likely enslaved at a plantation south of Nashville. Pre-Emancipation records are spotty, and many details have been lost to time, but they may have lived in the Black refugee camps that formed on the outskirts of the city during the Civil War. Records of African Americans became more detailed after the war and show that the Princes went on to become sharecroppers and house servants, washing white Nashvillians’ clothes before becoming fledgling restaurateurs.

Alongside the Princes’ family history, Martin draws on her meticulous research to demonstrate what life was like for other Black people in Nashville during the Reconstruction, Jim Crow and civil rights eras through today. As she progresses through the city’s past, she explains how city planners isolated Black citizens in bleak slums without plumbing or electricity. White landlords exploited the people living in these neighborhoods, but entrepreneurs such as Prince and his brother found a way out of poverty by preparing and selling food.

As Martin scours a historical record designed to exclude Black Americans, she admirably pieces together tales from individuals known and unknown. Her tone is both ebullient and reverent as she unearths the lives of Black people across the South, handling their history with care. Hot, Hot Chicken is an eye-opening, ingenious history that makes Nashville come alive in ways that transcend its downtown honky tonks—and will leave you with a newfound respect for the sizzling food on your plate.

Hot, Hot Chicken is an eye-opening, ingenious history that makes Nashville come alive in ways that transcend its downtown honky tonks.

Just as I Am

Narrator Robin Miles bringing the same warmth and depth of characterization to Cicely Tyson’s memoir as she did to Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste.
NonfictionMemoir

Floating in a Most Peculiar Way

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Searching for one’s identity can be a vertiginous experience, especially for an immigrant shuffling from one culture to another. In Floating in a Most Peculiar Way, Louis Chude-Sokei cannily captures this tumbling free fall through a variety of cultures as he negotiates what it means to be African in Jamaica and the United States.

Chude-Sokei was born in Biafra on July 6, 1967—just past midnight on the day that war was declared between Biafra and the Federal Republic of Nigeria. He learned early that his father, killed in the war, lived on in the country’s memory as a great Biafran hero. His mother—whom he heard referred to as the “Jackie O. of Nigeria,” in part because she always wore dark glasses—moved to the U.S. and sent the fatherless boy away to Jamaica, where he was raised by women and where his quest for a society among men began.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Louis Chude-Sokei shares his experience of transforming memory and truth, joy and pain, into his totally original memoir, Floating in a Most Peculiar Way.

Chude-Sokei’s mother eventually brought him to the U.S., where they lived first in Washington, D.C., and then in Los Angeles. In California, he learned what it takes to survive in an unfamiliar culture. He also discovered his love of stories and the music of David Bowie, both of which helped him navigate the rough waters of adapting to a new neighborhood and trying to find himself. Chude-Sokei felt like he had fallen from space, an alien creature in a Black neighborhood that didn’t accept his accent, his Blackness or his love of science fiction and David Bowie. He began to understand the “prejudices and tensions” within Black America and the “pain and promise” of living within them.

Floating in a Most Peculiar Way is a compelling story of the challenges of living what feels like “life on Mars.”

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Discover more great memoirs this Memoir March.

In his totally original memoir, Louis Chude-Sokei captures the prejudices and tensions, pain and promise of being African in Jamaica and the United States.

Tom Stoppard

This authorized biography of Tom Stoppard, one of the world’s great playwrights, sheds new light on his brilliant work and charmed life.

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