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Great Women Sculptors

The beautifully printed, encyclopedic Great Women Sculptors brings together more than 300 artists who have been excluded from institutions and canons on the basis of gender.
The beautifully printed, encyclopedic Great Women Sculptors brings together more than 300 artists who have been excluded from institutions and canons on the basis of gender.
NonfictionSocial ScienceLGBTQ+

American Teenager

Nico Lang’s powerful American Teenager closely follows seven transgender young adults, rendering complex, searing and sensitive portraits of their lives.
Nico Lang’s powerful American Teenager closely follows seven transgender young adults, rendering complex, searing and sensitive portraits of their lives.
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The Woman Beyond the Attic

This Edgar Award–nominated celebration of the famously private V.C. Andrews features family photos, personal letters, a partial manuscript for an unpublished novel, and more.
NonfictionAudioHumor

Quietly Hostile

Review by Norah Piehl

Humorist Samantha Irby’s fourth collection of essays, Quietly Hostile (9.5 hours), delivers another winning blend of hilarious observations and emotional insights, combined with a charming aura of disbelief over no longer being just a humble blogger. According to hate mail from angry fans, she’s now ruining the “Sex and the City” reboot as one of its newest writers. 

In 17 short essays, Irby addresses topics that range from her unapologetic love for the Cheesecake Factory and the Dave Matthews Band to her misadventures in pandemic pet adoption. Some essays—especially those focused on her parents and her estranged brother—are emotionally affecting, while others (such as one essay consisting of her descriptions of various porn video tags, or another structured as an FAQ about bathroom etiquette) are gleefully crude. Regardless of the mood of each piece, Irby’s narration, with matter-of-fact delivery and flawless comic timing, amps up the intended effect, making the listener feel like they’re just having a nice long hang with their funniest friend.

Read our review of the print edition of Quietly Hostile.

Samantha Irby’s narration, with matter-of-fact delivery and flawless comic timing, makes listeners of her fourth essay collection feel like they’re having a nice long hang with their funniest friend.

Raw Dog

Even when discussing unsavory hot dog-related topics, there’s something irresistible about Jamie Loftus’ narration, which is often incredibly funny.
NonfictionAudioMemoir

This Isn’t Going to End Well

Review by Deborah Mason

Daniel Wallace (Big Fish) idolized his brother-in-law, William Nealy—an artist, author, outdoorsman and renegade—until the day he died by a meticulously planned suicide in July 2001. In This Isn’t Going to End Well: The True Story of a Man I Thought I Knew (6.5 hours), Wallace paints a double portrait of his friend: the heroic mask he presented to the world, and the traumatized, troubled man behind it.

This story is painful. The audiobook begins with information on how to contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), and listeners should be prepared for a frank exploration of Nealy’s lifetime of suicidal ideation. But Wallace’s tale of loss, anger and absolution is also redemptive and beautiful, and Audie Award winner Michael Crouch’s sensitive and convincing narration gently leads the reader toward Wallace’s reconciliation with his beloved friend.

Daniel Wallace shares more about his discovery that writing a memoir is “very, very, very hard.”

Daniel Wallace’s tale of loss, anger and absolution is painful yet redemptive, and Audie Award winner Michael Crouch’s sensitive and convincing narration gently leads the reader toward Wallace’s reconciliation with a beloved friend.

August Wilson

August Wilson: A Life is an even-handed and absorbing exploration of a sui generis artist who followed his own rules both in the theater and in his personal life.
NonfictionMemoirHumorEssays

Congratulations, the Best is Over!

Review by Alice Cary

R. Eric Thomas is a big personality, and he owns it: “I’m a lot without reason or provocation.” He likes exclamation points, and he’s fun, funny, vulnerable and one hell of a storyteller. Readers will find him a hoot to hang out with in his second book of essays, Congratulations, the Best is Over!: Essays. It’s an excellent follow-up to Here for It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America, which recounted his coming-of-age in Baltimore, education at Columbia and early career writing for Elle. Now a multitalented pop-culture guru, Thomas has published a YA novel, Kings of B’more, and written for the TV shows “Better Things” and “Dickinson.”

These latest essays chronicle his courtship and marriage to David Norse Thomas, a white Presbyterian minister who was raised in Oregon. Their dissimilar backgrounds provide tender comedy, as seen in the account of their engagement on top of an Oregon peak at sunset: Eric describes the mountain as “one that we walked up with our feet and bodies and such.” By the end of the expedition, he’s shivering uncontrollably, saying, “David, I think nature is trying to kill me!”

In the first half of the book, “Homecoming,” the couple move from Philadelphia back to Baltimore —which is problematic for Eric, since Baltimore “was where all the ghosts of the unhappy person I used to be still lived.” Eric’s discussions of his depression are frank and charismatic. “I feel like I’m talking about the inner workings of a stranger. The sadness is real and it is always around and it is not who I am.” Readers can feel his loneliness as he writes at his apartment desk, and his attempts to find friends and community are both touching and hilarious.

Engaging stories about neighbors, landscaping and a horde of very loud frogs ensue in the second half of the book, “Homegoing.” When the COVID-19 pandemic hits, Eric and his husband buy a house set on a half acre of land—which Eric poignantly connects to the failed promise of 40 acres and a mule to formerly enslaved Black people in 1865—out in northern Baltimore County. As Eric explains, “Apparently the key to getting me to consider the appeal of the suburbs is locking me in my city apartment for fifty-two days. On day fifty-three, suddenly I’m like, ‘You know what really rings my bells? A Nest camera, a cul-de-sac, and an HOA handbook full of microaggressions.’”

Thomas will keep you laughing, but underneath his mirth lies a wealth of thoughtful observations about his life, family, politics, pop culture and especially his marriage.

R. Eric Thomas will keep you laughing, but underneath the mirth of this excellent essay collection lies a wealth of thoughtful observations about his life, family, politics, pop culture and especially his marriage.

Goodbye, Eastern Europe

Journalist and historian Jacob Mikanowski manages to pull off the nearly impossible—an accessible and detailed history of Eastern Europe that spans 2,000 years in under 400 pages.
NonfictionSelf-HelpLifestylesFamily & Relationships

How to Say Goodbye

Review by Susannah Felts

Death is a process—a challenge for both the dying and their loved ones, and a journey of wide-ranging emotional shifts, yet rarely are we encouraged to fully experience it as such. The illustrated approach of Wendy MacNaughton’s How to Say Goodbye is a quietly powerful gesture in the right direction. As an artist-in-residence at a San Francisco hospice, McNaughton closely observed the dying and their caregivers, absorbing wisdom and appreciating small moments—a plate of fruit, flowers, hands held. “Drawing is a way we can look closely at something we might otherwise be afraid to look at,” she reflects. Her gentle pictures are followed by a deep well of resources for the dying and those who love and care for them. In his foreword, palliative care physician BJ Miller, MD, sets the tone: “​​Presence, after all, is not an intellectual exercise. It’s a corporeal surrender. Attuning, if you like. What does your body tell you about what the body before you is doing? What does your soul know about the one playing at the edge of existence right in front of you? Can you stop trying to figure it out and just be it?”

Wendy MacNaughton’s gentle drawings are followed by a deep well of resources for the dying and those who love and care for them.

Kings of Their Own Ocean

The enthralling Kings of Their Own Ocean tells the story of an overlooked predator, the Atlantic bluefin tuna, urging readers to consider its power and beauty beyond the dinner plate.
NonfictionNatureLifestylesCrafts, Hobbies & Home

Land Art

Review by Susannah Felts

U.K. artist James Brunt “works with what nature gives”: only what is found on the ground, in natural settings like beaches and woodlands. Imagine great spirals, mandalas, grids and other patterns composed of rocks, twigs, seeds, fern fronds, petals or leaves upon sand or forest floor. In Land Art, Brunt familiarizes us with his creative terrain—also famously explored by land artists such as Andy Goldsworthy and Robert Smithson (“Spiral Jetty”)—and invites us, too, to “get outside and play.” He provides exercises that first coax us into engagement with our natural surroundings and then into the act of art-making. For starters, find 10 of anything, such as pine cones or other seeds; then arrange them in a pattern of your liking. Brunt’s work, presented with infectious enthusiasm through full-color photographs, is gorgeous and mesmerizing.

Made from found natural objects like rocks, twigs and seeds, James Brunt’s gorgeous and mesmerizing art is presented with infectious enthusiasm through full-color photographs.
NonfictionMemoirFamily & Relationships

Pulling the Chariot of the Sun

Review by Destiny O. Birdsong

When award-winning poet Shane McCrae was born to a white mother and a Black father in Oregon in 1975, his maternal grandmother designated him “white” on his birth certificate, claiming it was because she wanted him to have “all the advantages.” However, when she and her husband kidnapped him from his parents and brought him to Texas three years later, the 13 years McCrae spent with them were filled with anything but. 

Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping is more than the memoir of an abduction: It is a story about how racial identity is shaped by both presence and absence in a child’s life. McCrae explores memory itself and what happens when violence and deception warp the brain’s ability to maintain clear distinctions between fact and fantasy. 

In chapters that read more like vignettes than chronological narratives, McCrae traces his journey from the Pacific Northwest to the Southwest and back again; narrates the complicated relationships between his mother and her parents; and mourns the absence of a father whom his grandparents attempted to erase from his life in every way possible. Throughout, McCrae undertakes in prose the age-old bard’s task: to lend a voice to—and by extension, make sense of—the inconceivable, even as the admitted gaps in his own memory work against meaning, resolution and wholeness. 

Pulling the Chariot of the Sun wrestles with the brain’s unreliability in the wake of trauma, as well as the reality that, regardless of who raised us, few of the stories we inherit about ourselves are accurate. McCrae’s work becomes less about arriving at any irrefutable conclusion and rather about reaching a point where we are willing to concede the impossibility of truth, even as we continue to reconstruct all we know in an attempt to get as close as we can.

In a gripping memoir, acclaimed poet Shane McCrae tells the remarkable story of how his white maternal grandparents kidnapped him in an attempt to shape his racial identity and erase his memories of his Black father.

Sea Change

Combining scientific exploration with essays, poetry and other works by indigenous artists, Sea Change is a profound, unflinching document of places vanishing before our eyes.

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