Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
Every week in this space, we quote from our reviews of the books we recommend — but we rarely quote from the books themselves, largely because the reviews we link to do such a good job of that on their own, and with context to boot. But what the heck. This week our recommended books include a poetry collection, Robyn Schiff’s “Information Desk,” that offers a reminiscence of her post-college job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art while skipping merrily through sparkling ideas about art and nature and youth and life. Good quotes abound, as in this wry observation on the artistic temperament: “When someone tells me he’s inspired/I usually take/it to mean someone else/does his dishes.”
We also recommend a memoir about food and literature by The Times’s book critic Dwight Garner, whose way with a sentence will be familiar to regular readers of our books coverage. That skill is manifest throughout his memoir as well. Here he is, for instance, on the appeal that the chef Jacques Pépin’s cooking videos exerted during the early days of Covid lockdown: “With people out of work, and others fearful of joining them, and still others shell-shocked and instinctively practicing thrift, Pépin’s recipes spoke to a moment. I found many of his videos to be, on certain insomniac nights, strangely and almost unbearably moving. His age, his battered good looks, his accent, the slight sibilance in his voice, his culinary erudition worn lightly, his finely honed knife skills, and the ’70s-era funk of his wood-paneled kitchen: It was a mesmerizing package. I especially liked to watch him cook eggs.”
There’s more to read this week, of course, including a novel that pays homage to Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House” along with fiction from Teju Cole, Marie NDiaye, Jessica Knoll and others. In nonfiction, we recommend a collection of journalism out of Russia and a history of the vexing, fascinating attempt to study the mysteries of sleep. Happy reading.
—Gregory Cowles
A HAUNTING ON THE HILL
Elizabeth Hand
Apparitions, black hares and time warps festoon this fitting — and frightening — homage to Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House,” in which Hand mines the source material for structure and storytelling beats rather than relying on superficial similarities.
“Above all, it’s scary. Hand’s facility with language and atmosphere and use of short, propulsive chapters work their own dark magic.”
From Emily C. Hughes’s review
Mulholland | $27
BRIGHT YOUNG WOMEN
Jessica Knoll
Knoll’s assured novel begins near the end of the serial killer Ted Bundy’s gruesome spree: at a Florida sorority house where he attacked four sisters in 1978. Knoll pooh-poohs Bundy’s ballyhooed intelligence, celebrating instead the promise and perspicacity of his penultimate victims.
“Packed with moments when you feel the size of the deck stacked against any woman, young or old, who dares to be ‘bright.’ There’s always something in the dark that curses the glittering and the hopeful.”
From Patton Oswalt’s review
Marysue Rucci | $27.99
THE HALT DURING THE CHASE
Rosemary Tonks
First published in 1972, and newly reissued, this is a bubbly, empathetic and ultimately lovely novel of a belated coming-of-age in 1960s London. The heroine’s haunted relationship with her mother, and the ways that relationship reprises itself in her romantic life, give her story substance.
“From the first page of this clever, fishy little novel, our narrator, Sophie, is the kind of woman whose laughter is a weapon. She could scare off an assailant with one well-timed whack of her tongue.”
From Mary Marge Locker’s review
New Directions | Paperback, $17.95
TREMOR
Teju Cole
Cole’s new novel collects the reflections of a Nigerian American professor who uses art to explore traumatic, sometimes violent histories. Paintings, photographs, antiques of dubious provenance: All prompt questions of identity, perspective and power, and invite readers to scrutinize themselves.
“The most sundry and vagrant of Cole’s works to date. … The reader is at first seduced by Cole’s mastery of anecdote before being immersed in rich, sometimes discomfiting ideas.”
From Brian Dillon’s review
Random House | $28
VENGEANCE IS MINE
Marie NDiaye
NDiaye’s latest psychological thriller, translated by Jordan Stump, follows a lawyer named Maître Susane who is reunited with a man she knew when they were both teenagers. But his presence brings fear rather than comfort: Something happened in his bedroom 30 years ago, and Maître Susane can’t recall what.
“As in NDiaye’s other novels, the story lives not in the incident but its aftermath.”
From Lovia Gyarkye’s review
Knopf | $28
THE UPSTAIRS DELICATESSEN:
On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading
Dwight Garner
Ranging from his boyhood in Florida and West Virginia to his adult life as an editor and reviewer, this intimate and joyful memoir by a Times book critic valorizes an unpretentious and hungry way of reading, eating and living with gusto.
“What’s refreshing here is that Garner never problematizes his eating and reading habits; they were and remain the engine of his vitality.”
From Jennifer Reese’s review
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $27
I LOVE RUSSIA:
Reporting From a Lost Country
Elena Kostyuchenko
Originally published in an independent Russian newspaper, and translated here by Bela Shayevich and Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse, this collection of articles by a journalist who has since relocated to the West casts sympathetic light on the struggles of her country’s far-flung citizens.
“Kaleidoscopic. … Traces the recent evolution of Russian society, highlighting its persistent inequality and injustice, and suggesting why so many Russians stay silent as their leader prosecutes a ruinous war.”
From Valerie Hopkins’s review
Penguin Press | $30
MAPPING THE DARKNESS:
The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked the Mysteries of Sleep
Kenneth Miller
The field of sleep science has had a turbulent history: often treated with skepticism, frequently underfunded and filled with restless characters. Miller, a journalist, presents his story with brio and a certain wonder.
“Commanding, bright and deft. … Cuts and flows through the last century of impossibly complex stop-start progress in the measuring and quantifying of sleep — why we do it, and how. None of it is simple and all of it is captivating.”
From Samantha Harvey’s review
Hachette | $32.50
INFORMATION DESK:
An Epic
Robyn Schiff
Schiff took a routine job in the Metropolitan Museum of Art soon after college; these poems revisit that time in short, staggered lines that are perceptive and often comic.
“While ‘Information Desk’ is about many things, at its core is the idea that one work of art begets another. … Artists of every kind both reinvent themselves and add to what Schiff calls the ‘gorgeous and harrowing hoard’ of ‘magic and mundane objects’ that make up the art world.”
From David Kirby’s review
Penguin Poets | Paperback, $20