Books Briefing: Louise Glück, Nobel laureate

October 13, 2020

Louise Glück is the 2020 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Katherine Wolkoff

Hi readers,

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

The news:

The poet Louise Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature last week. “I was unprepared,” she told us in an interview shortly after the award was announced. “It seemed to be extremely unlikely that I would ever have this particular event to deal with in my life.”
As our critic Dwight Garner writes in his tribute to the poet: “One of the things to love about Glück’s poetry is that, while her work contains many emotional registers, she is not afraid to be cruel.” Don’t know where to start with Glück? Here is a quick guide to her work.
“Hiroshima,” John Hersey’s extraordinary account of the atomic destruction in Japan, has been widely read across the world — except for Russia. Now, 75 years later, a Russian translation is available at last.
On social media, critics of the president’s and other Republicans’ behavior have been sharing a line from “The Great Gatsby” that describes the novel’s rich, blasé Buchanans as “careless people” whose self-interest harms everyone around them. To some, that description also fits an administration that has attempted to play down the coronavirus pandemic.
Our sports reporter Kevin Draper dives into “Win at All Costs,” the latest book about Nike, and finds that the scandals it chronicles echo in many other books about the company.
Fiction out today: “Shelter in Place,” by David Leavitt; “The Wind Traveler,” by Alonso Cueto; “The Adventures of China Iron,” by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara.
Nonfiction out today: “Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write,” by Claire Messud; “150 Glimpses of the Beatles,” by Craig Brown; “Gambling With Armageddon,” by Martin J. Sherwin; “The Upswing,” by Robert D. Putnam with Shaylyn Romney Garrett; “The Language of Thieves,” by Martin Puchner; “What Tech Calls Thinking,” by Adrian Daub; “Brave New Home,” by Diana Lind; “A Good Time to Be Born,” by Perri Klass; “The Churchill Myths,” by Steven Fielding, Bill Schwarz and Richard Toye.

The critics:

Dwight Garner reviews “The Silence,” a short new novel by Don DeLillo about — among other things — the Super Bowl, mass consumption and intimations of the end of the world. “DeLillo’s syntax is as prickly as ever,” Garner writes, calling the author our “laureate of paranoia and dread.”
Jennifer Szalai writes about “The Knowledge Machine,” a “provocative and fascinating book” in which the philosopher Michael Strevens says that there is something fundamentally irrational about modern science.
It’s been more than 30 years since John Grisham introduced readers to Jack Brigance, a small-town Mississippi lawyer, in his first novel. Brigance is back for a third time in Grisham’s new book, “A Time For Mercy.” Sarah Lyall writes: “You get the feeling that Grisham, who has written several dozen books by now, has returned to the place closest to his heart.”

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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