Books briefing: Italy’s instant coronavirus books

April 14, 2020

Paolo Giordano in 2018. His new book, “How Contagion Works,” is intended as a record of his experience during the coronavirus outbreak in Italy. “I don’t want to lose what the epidemic is revealing about ourselves,” he writes.Merlijn Doomernik/Hollandse Hoog, via Redux

Hi readers,

Here’s your weekly catch-up on everything you need to know going on in the book world.

The news:

In Italy, books about the coronavirus have already emerged as their own micro genre. Some writers have faced criticism, but as one author puts it: “Some thoughts need to be written down now, from within the emergency, otherwise they will get lost in the desire to go back to normality as soon as possible.”
We visit the London studio of the illustrator Tom Gauld, who was probably the first artist to imagine “science cartoons,” let alone make them funny.
Jon Pessah talks about “Yogi,” his new biography of the baseball legend Yogi Berra, which dives into the complicated and sensitive man behind the funny quotes and the exceptional career.
Fiction out today: “The Eighth Life,” by Nino Haratischvili; “Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982,” by Cho Nam-Joo; “Braised Pork,” by An Yu; “Man of My Time,” by Dalia Sofer; “A Luminous Republic,” by Andrés Barba.
Nonfiction out today: “The Year 1000,” by Valerie Hansen; “Miss Aluminum,” by Susanna Moore; “The Address Book,” by Deirdre Mask; “No Filter,” by Sarah Brier; “Becoming Wild,” by Carl Safina; “Synthesizing Gravity,” by Kay Ryan.

The critics:

Dwight Garner reviews Helen Sullivan’s first collection, “Three Poems,” which has shades of both Frederick Seidel and T.S. Eliot, though her frame of reference is effortlessly wide.
Parul Sehgal writes about “Attention: A Love Story,” in which the journalist Casey Schwarz turns her relationship with Adderall into a broader examination of the science behind human concentration.
In “Notes From an Apocalypse,” Mark O’Connell traveled across the world to see how people are preparing for the worst, visiting tricked-out bunkers, wilderness reserves, space-colonizing conferences and other places. Even though he started his research years before the coronavirus pandemic, as Jennifer Szalai notes in her review, “O’Connell’s timing was either a bit premature or just right.”

That’s all for now. Please stay in touch and let me know what you think — whether it’s about this newsletter, our reviews, our podcast, our literary calendar, our Instagram or what you’re reading. We on the Books desk read all of it, and I’ll make every effort to write back. You can reach me at books@nytimes.com.

All my best,

Joumana Khatib

Books at The New York Times

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