11 New Books We Recommend This Week

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/books/review/11-new-books-we-recommend-this-week.html

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Murder! Espionage! Fashion! We’ve got a fun grab-bag of books this week, from true crime (“The Trial of Lizzie Borden”) to memoir (Isaac Mizrahi’s “I.M.,” Aatish Taseer’s “The Twice-Born”) to three different takes on groundbreaking women: an anthology of Andrea Dworkin’s feminist writings, a group study of five female novelists and a biography of the woman who organized a spy ring for the French Resistance. In fiction, Helen Oyeyemi has a new novel, and we recommend story collections from David Means and Christos Ikonomou alongside a debut novel from Novuyo Rosa Tshuma that explores Zimbabwe’s troubled history. Finally, something from one of our own: The Times’s top newsroom lawyer, David McCraw, has written a spirited examination of truth, journalism and the First Amendment as it plays out in his job and in the culture at large. That book, “Truth in Our Times,” is a good bet for Times readers as much as Times employees, and for anyone who cares about the future of a free press.

Gregory CowlesSenior Editor, BooksTwitter: @GregoryCowles

THE TRIAL OF LIZZIE BORDEN: A True Story, by Cara Robertson. (Simon & Schuster, $28.) Lizzie Borden, accused of killing her father and stepmother with an ax in 1892, has gone down in history as villain, victim, punch line and the media sensation of the Gilded Age. This new book about the case was nearly 20 years in the making, and it is “enthralling,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. “Robertson does not work for the prosecution or the defense. She marshals us to no conclusion. She only reopens the case and presents the evidence afresh, all those alluring details out of an Agatha Christie novel.”

LAST DAYS AT HOT SLIT: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin, by Andrea Dworkin. Edited by Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder (Semiotext(e), $17.95.) Andrea Dworkin, who died in 2005, at 58, was determined to show how women could never be free as long as they lived in a world that was structured by men’s ambitions, needs and desires. This new anthology collects pieces of her essays, novels and previously unpublished works. “A new generation of feminists have reclaimed her,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes, “seeing in Dworkin’s incandescent rage a source of illumination, even as they bristle at some of her specific views. This new anthology of her work, shows that the caricature of her as a simplistic man-hater, a termagant in overalls, could only be sustained by not reading what she actually wrote.”

GINGERBREAD, by Helen Oyeyemi. (Riverhead, $27.) For her new novel — a meditation on family and what it means to be part of a community — Oyeyemi has taken old fairy tales, seasoned them with 20th-century history and pop-culture references, and frosted them with whimsical detail. “Her sentences are like grabbing onto the tail of a vibrant, living creature without knowing what you’ll find at the other end,” Eowyn Ivey writes in her review. The novel is “jarring, funny, surprising, unsettling, disorienting and rewarding. It requires the reader to be quick-footed and alert. And by the end, it is clear what has grounded the story from the start — the tender and troubling humanity of its characters.”

I.M.: A Memoir, by Isaac Mizrahi. (Flatiron, $28.99.) Throughout this autobiography by one of America’s most acclaimed designers of the 1990s, his innovation and confidence are evident, contrasting with an industry that, despite its superficial fickleness, can be deeply resistant to change. Our reviewer, Thessaly La Force, finds Mizrahi’s descriptions of his unhappy boyhood to be “unexpectedly tender” as well as “heartfelt and honest.” She concludes that Mizrahi is, “at his core, an artist above all else.”

TRUTH IN OUR TIMES: Inside the Fight for Press Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts, by David E. McCraw. (All Points, $28.99.) McCraw, the deputy general counsel of The Times, leads readers through some of his most memorable cases, particularly those involving Donald Trump. He expresses concern about the crisis of public trust, stating that “the law can do only so much.” Preet Bharara, reviewing it, says that “McCraw is in prime position to provide this backstage view as he draws equally on his experience as a writer and a lawyer. He excels at both, explaining legal issues in lay terms and unspooling the stories that propel the book.”

MADAME FOURCADE’S SECRET WAR: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France’s Largest Spy Network Against Hitler, by Lynne Olson. (Random House, $30.) Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, who fought the Nazis while enduring sexism in her ranks, is little remembered today. This biography argues that she should be celebrated. “Olson writes with verve and a historian’s authority,” Kati Marton writes in her review. “Fourcade, she tells us, was beautiful and liked men, but she was obsessed with defeating the despised Boches. … With this gripping tale Lynne Olson pays her what history has so far denied her. France, slow to confront the stain of Vichy, would do well to finally honor a fighter most of us would want in our foxhole.”

INSTRUCTIONS FOR A FUNERAL: Stories, by David Means. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Means’s fifth collection, populated with adulterers and criminals, railroad bums and other castaways, suggests that beneath every act of violence there pulses a vein of grace. “This is Means’s most self-reflective and self-reflexive book to date,” Justin Taylor writes in his review, “both sweeping and narrow, panoramic and fragmentary, possessed … by ‘a gloriously full understanding … fractured to shards.’ What beauty there is in their jagged gleaming. What pleasure it gives us to gather them up, and to dream of a world made whole.”

GOOD WILL COME FROM THE SEA, by Christos Ikonomou. Translated by Karen Emmerich. (Archipelago, paper, $18.) This collection of linked stories, set on an unnamed Aegean island and featuring a cast of wry, rough-talking Greeks reeling from the country’s economic devastation, showcases Ikonomou’s wit, compassion and infallible ear for the demotic. “In Ikonomou’s world, the island is a prison and the sea forms the bars,” Fani Papageorgiou writes, reviewing it. “Yet he approaches the grimness and desperation of his characters’ lives with lightness and humor, in an idiomatic Greek seamlessly translated by Karen Emmerich. … In his prose, the lyrical and the rough are always intertwined.”

OUTSIDERS: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World, by Lyndall Gordon. (Johns Hopkins University, $29.95.) Gordon links five visionaries who made literary history — George Eliot, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Olive Schreiner and Virginia Woolf — through their shared understanding of death and violence. “Gordon is best known for her brilliant studies of Woolf, Charlotte Brontë and Emily Dickinson,” our reviewer, Lara Feigel, writes. “As a biographer, she’s been a visionary herself, mind-reading her way into these figures’ creative processes. She displays the same insight here.”

THE TWICE-BORN: Life and Death on the Ganges, by Aatish Taseer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Attempting to rediscover his traditional Indian roots through the study of Sanskrit, a journalist finds himself alienated from them. “Taseer’s discovery of India results in a detailed, learned and highly readable tour of Hindu history,” Wendy Doniger writes in her review, “noting many of the positive contributions of the centuries of Muslim rule and dwelling at some length on the degrading and demoralizing effects of the British Raj. But along the way, the saffron scales seem to fall from his eyes as he describes the rise of Hindu nationalism.”

HOUSE OF STONE, by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma. (Norton, $26.95.) This ambitious and ingenious first novel uses a young man’s search for his personal ancestry as a way of unearthing hidden aspects of Zimbabwe’s violent past. In his review, Dinaw Mengestu calls it a “remarkable” debut whose hero, Zamani is “too rich and complicated a character to be reduced to any single metaphor or symbol. … Tshuma’s brilliant layering of competing images and metaphors is one of the many marvels of this wise and demanding novel. While Zamani may claim, over and over, that what he’s seeking is a full accounting of history at the most intimate level, the stories that are slowly and painfully revealed suggest that something far more complicated is at work.”