Bethanne Patrick review recommends 10 promising titles, fiction and non-fiction, to consider for your April reading list.
Spring is there, and with him, books that offer revolutionary ideas to expand our perspectives. The harvest of non-fiction includes the point of view of an acclaimed novelist on writing as a person of color, a burning but carefully documented call to changes in the application of the law and a history centered on Latin America in our hemisphere, not to mention one of the most intelligent collections of cultural criticism.
However, those who prefer fiction also have new choices. A first novel examines how a gay black man faces a family trauma on her wedding monitoring. A much younger woman and man meet for lunch in Manhattan, the tensions high but their unknown relationship, while in another book, a fractured family meets in Shanghai around a hospital bed. Happy reading!
FICTION
Slag and talented: a novel
By Olive Blake
Tor books: 512 pages, $ 30
(April 1)
Blake, known for the series “The Atlas”, began to write a fan-fiction, he should therefore not surprise anyone that this autonomous fantasy borrows elements of other stories, including a dark academic, sagas of family dynasty and trips to adulthood. The three brothers and sisters Wren – Meredith, Arthur and Eilidh – have great supernatural gifts, but when their father dies and leaves his company, Wrenfare Magitech, who needs a new managing director, their too human rivalries and fragiles reveal themselves.
Rabbit Moon: a novel
By Jennifer Haigh
Small, brown: 288 pages, $ 29
(April 1)
Haigh was on a scholarship in Shanghai where she witnessed so many traffic accidents that she began to evoke a story on an American student named Lindsey, struck by a driver of flight offense. Lindsey's parents fly to the Chinese city and actually follow the restoration of their elder, leaving their younger daughter, Grace, who was adopted from China, Maroron to the summer camp without any information. Will the family heal or stay away?
Hearing: a novel
By Katie Kitamura
Riverhead Books: 208 pages, $ 28
(April 8)
Cleanment decided in two parts, this spare novel of complicated – personal, professional and family ambitions – opposes three people against their places perceived in the world as well as their shadow rarely recognized. The narrator is an actor worried about his failing game; A lunch with a much younger man has turned his world upside down. In the second section of the book, the two lunch again, this time with her husband. What roles will they be thrown in?
My documents: a novel
By Kevin Nguyen
A world: 352 pages, $ 28
(April 8)
The four youngest members of the Nguyen family did not plan that two of them set in a camp set up for Vietnamese Americans following violent attacks. The brothers and sisters Jen and Duncan and their mother are sent to the Tacoma camp, while Ursula and Alvin receive exemptions. Nguyen takes historical realities and draws them in an affecting and affectionate history showing the ability of a family to resist fascism in all its forms.
When the harvest comes: a novel
By this Michele Norris
Random house: 304 pages, $ 28
(April 15)
Davis, a gay black man, is about to celebrate his marriage to Bisexual Everett Blanc, when his sister announces that their father, the Reverend, died in a car accident. This strict minister Paterfamilias disapproved of his literature of literacy, and following the loss, Davis finds comfort in music and female identity, slowly healing from distance.
Non-fiction
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Authority: tests
By Andrea Long Chu
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 288 pages, $ 30
(April 1)
Chu writes on culture, all this, from science fiction of Octavia Butler to the Essais of Maggie Nelson to musicals such as “The Phantom of the Opera” and on television, video games, in the cinema and, oh yes, to the notions of sex. CHU uses his considerable expertise to assert that criticism can and must leave behind theoretical problems and tackle the major dangerous global problems at hand.
Fleez: black lives, police and security services for all
By Sandy Hudson
Pantheon: 288 pages, $ 29
(April 1)
The lawyer, activist, activist, author and Canadian producer is now based in Los Angeles, where she is well placed to launch her book on the change in the very nature of contemporary police forces. Hudson's arguments on the way social policies related to the police have little basis in results and data are convincing, as is their calls to start small and establish more human and peaceful methods to maintain peace.
To save and destroy: write as other
By Viet that Nguyen
Belknap Press: 144 pages, $ 27
(April 8)
Pulitzer's winning author of “The Sympathizer” and Professor USC publishes here his Norton 2023 conferences at Harvard who focus on what an outsider brings to American literature. The novelist, who arrived in the United States as a refugee child with his family in 1975, elucidated his writer influences and questions the idea that any minority voice could serve as a “model” for a race or ethnicity.
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Fugitive tilts: tests
By Ishion Hutchinson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 384 pages, $ 33
(April 15)
The essays of the poet Hutchinson turn and roll like the sea which surrounded and focused its life and its art, from its beginnings in Jamaica to its coastal trips to its conviction that the waters of the ocean ultimately connect us through suffering and joy. May his eye turn to childhood literature like “Treasure Island”, reggae music or an impressionist painting, the author links his influences to the broader world of art, community and our shared humanity.
America, America: a new story of the new world
By Greg Grandin
Penguin Press: 768 pages, $ 35
(April 22)
“American” history courses are often focused on North America and its European origins, but in this volume long expected by the scholarship holder and the Yale Grandin Professor show that the training and the founders of Latin America are not only important but crucial for the understanding of America overall. Covering 500 years and events from conquests to wars to racism, “America, American” should be required to read in these history courses.
