Book Suggestions

Additional notes:

The Amor Towles book on the list is not his most recent. Available October 2021: The Lincoln Highway. Excerpt from an NPR review:

Like his first two novels, The Lincoln Highway is elegantly constructed and compulsively readable. Again, one of the ideas Towles explores is how evil can be offset by decency and kindness on any rung of the socio-economic ladder. His first novel, Rules of Civility (2011), set among social strivers in New York City in 1936, took its inspiration from F. Scott Fitzgerald and its title from George Washington’s Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation. His much-loved second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), incorporated nods toward the great Russian writers and shades of Eloise at the Plaza and Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. Mostly confined to a single setting — Moscow’s luxurious Metropol Hotel — it spanned 32 years under Stalin’s grim rule.

Towles’ new novel ranges further geographically — from Nebraska’s farmland to New York’s Adirondacks by way of some of New York City’s iconic sites — but its action-packed plot is compressed into just 10 days. The Lincoln Highway, which owes a debt to Huckleberry Finn, revisits American myths with a mix of warm-hearted humor and occasional outbursts of physical violence and malevolence that recall E.L. Doctorow’s work, including Ragtime. -Laura

WHEREABOUTS, Jhumpa Lahiri [celebrated for her tales of Southeast Asian immigrants and their American offspring — beginning with her Pulitzer Prize-winning story collection, The Interpreter of Maladies (1999), and her first novel, The Namesake (2003) — she moved to Rome in 2011 for a few years, which changed her work and her life. She fell so deeply in love with Italian that she decided to write a book about her new language in her new language, which was translated into English by Ann Goldstein and published in the United States as In Other Words (2015). Lahiri’s fifth book of fiction is yet another departure. Whereabouts is her first novel since The Lowland (2013). It is also her first novel written in Italian and translated into English by Lahiri herself. It was published in Italy in 2018 as Dove mi trovo, which literally translates as “Where I find myself” — an apt declaration for a writer whose work has always focused on cultural relocations.];   -Deb

NOTES ON GRIEF, Ngozi Adichie–a raw elegy for her father, “Notes on Grief makes visceral the experience of death and grieving. In poetic bursts of imagistic prose that mirror the fracturing of self after the death of a beloved … ;]  The Resisters Gish Jen [ Jen’s new novel,  at first, seems like a departure: It’s dystopian fiction about an America of the near future, filled with eavesdropping houses, surveillance drones, & an all-powerful Internet entity called “Aunt Nettie” — a sly mash-up of 1984’s “Big Brother” and those sinister aunts who enforced . . .] -Deb