Books Briefing: New literary leadership at PEN

September 8, 2020

“Literature has a place in our national life,” Ayad Akhtar said. “It can be part of our national discourse and can contribute to it in interesting ways.”Vincent Tullo for The New York Times

Hi readers,

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

The news:

PEN America has named Ayad Akhtar its next president. The Pulitzer-winning playwright, whose new novel, “Homeland Elegies,” comes out this month, succeeds the novelist Jennifer Egan at the literary and human rights organization. We spoke with him about literature and activism, “cancel culture” and other subjects.
We rounded up some of the most important takeaways from Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s new memoir, “Speaking for Myself.”
Jenna Bush Hager, former first daughter, has become a mover and shaker in the books world, thanks to her influential Read With Jenna book club. Now, she’s releasing an essay collection of her own.
First published in Italy in 1962, Gianni Rodari’s “Telephone Tales” is a collection of children’s stories intended to be short enough that one could be read during a 20th-century pay phone call. The first English language edition is out today.
The C.I.A. has uncensored a memoir by Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. counterterrorism expert and a critic of America’s use of torture. W.W. Norton will release a more complete version of the book, “The Black Banners (Declassified): How Torture Derailed the War on Terror After 9/11,” next month.
Fiction out today: “What Are You Going Through,” by Sigrid Nunez; “Monogamy,” by Sue Miller; “The Memory Monster,” by Yishai Sarid.
Nonfiction out today: “JFK,” by Fredrik Logevall; “Money,” by Jacob Goldstein; “The Secret Life of Groceries,” by Benjamin Lorr; “Breaking Bread With the Dead,” by Alan Jacobs; “Republic of Wrath,” by James A. Morone; “Disloyal,” by Michael Cohen.

The critics:

Dwight Garner reviews “Inside the NRA,” a new tell-all memoir by Joshua L. Powell, the organization’s former senior strategist. “Powell’s apostasy is the primary news here,” Garner writes. “He comes out in favor of minor forms of gun control, things like background checks and so-called red flag laws and the closing of loopholes around gun show sales. This counts as fearless speech only in the paranoid and steroidal world of the N.R.A., which brooks zero dissent.”
Parul Sehgal reviews “The Discomfort of Evening,” by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, the winner of this year’s International Booker Prize. The debut novel tells the disturbing story of a family of dairy farmers, members of a strict Protestant sect who are mourning the death of a child. “The novel didn’t give me nightmares only because sleep became a faint possibility,” Sehgal writes. “Rijneveld will play to all your phobias and nurture new ones. Even now, my blood jumps to remember certain images.”
And Jennifer Szalai reviews “Vanguard,” by Martha S. Jones, about Black women’s vital role over the decades in the fight for voting rights. Szalai calls the book an “elegant and expansive history of Black women who sought to build political power where they could.” The book covers some women who did things “first,” but it isn’t overly fixated on initial milestones. “Jones is just as interested in everything these women made possible — not just the trails they blazed, but the journeys they took, and what came after.”

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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