Books Briefing: The bookshelf detective is back

July 28, 2020

Hi readers,

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

The news:

Wondering what Tom Hanks, Yo-Yo Ma, Sean Penn, Regina King and other celebrities are reading? We scrutinized their shelves for insight; here’s what our sleuthing found.
Hilary Mantel, Anne Tyler and Kiley Reid are among the authors longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize. The nominees this year include nine women and a number of debut novelists. Here’s the full list.
When the U.S. went into lockdown, stores like Walmart and Target remained open. So when anxious consumers were stocking up on beans and pasta, they also grabbed workbooks, paperbacks and novels — and the book sales at those stores shot up.
We spoke to the the influential gay novelist Edmund White, who has survived H.I.V. and a heart attack, and intends to make it through this pandemic, too. His latest novel, “A Saint From Texas,” comes out next week.
New translations of the “Aeneid,” “Beowulf” and other ancient stories, arriving in the turbulent landscape of 2020, suggest that it’s time to take a second look at these tales that have for so long shaped the West’s understanding of the world.
Fiction out today: “A Star Is Bored,” by Byron Lane; “Afterland,” by Lauren Beukes; “Empire of Wild,” by Cherie Dimaline; “The Butterfly Lampshade,” by Aimee Bender.
Nonfiction out today: “To Start a War,” by Robert Draper; “Last Mission to Tokyo,” by Michel Paradis; “Eat the Buddha,” by Barbara Demick; “Memorial Drive,” by Natasha Trethewey; “The Apocalypse Factory,” by Steve Olson; “The Hunting of Hillary,” by Michael D’Antonio; “A Dominant Character,” by Samanth Subramanian.

The critics:

Dwight Garner reviews “Memorial Drive,” by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey, in which she recalls her Southern childhood and her mother’s murder when the author was 19. Trethewey’s poems have included autobiographical details, but Garner writes: “Nothing she has written drills down into her past, and her family’s, as powerfully as ‘Memorial Drive.’ It is a controlled burn of chaos and intellection; it is a memoir that will really lay you out.”
Jennifer Szalai writes about “Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy,” by Margaret Sullivan, the media columnist for The Washington Post and the former public editor for The New York Times. “Like the climate emergency that Sullivan mentions by way of comparison, the decimation of local news yields two phenomena that happen to feed off each other: The far-reaching effects are cataclysmic, and it’s hard to convince a significant number of people that they ought to care.”
In “Intimations,” Zadie Smith’s slender new volume of very timely essays (including some written during the pandemic), the writer “showcases her trademark levelheadedness,” our reviewer John Williams writes.

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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Book Your Calendar Here: 2020’s Major Literary Events

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