new york review of books june 2022

Life Is Short. Indexes Are Necessary.

Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age

by Dennis Duncan

The Divine Guido

an exhibition at the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, March 28–July 9, 2023

Escaping Biography

Nathalie Sarraute: A Life Between

by Ann Jefferson

June 12, 2020

Fireball over siberia.

Tunguska: A Siberian Mystery and Its Environmental Legacy

by Andy Bruno

Who Are the Taliban Now?

The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan After the Americans Left

by Hassan Abbas

Right Busy with Sticks and Spales

Tudor Children

by Nicholas Orme

A Poisonous Legacy

Who Killed Jane Stanford?: A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits, and the Birth of a University

by Richard White

American Disruptor: The Scandalous Life of Leland Stanford

by Roland De Wolk

The Millions We Failed to Save

The US and the Holocaust

a PBS documentary series directed and produced by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein

In the Garden of the Righteous: The Heroes Who Risked Their Lives to Save Jews During the Holocaust

by Richard Hurowitz

Death and the Hedgehog

Tolstoy as Philosopher: Essential Short Writings (1835–1910): An Anthology

edited and translated from the Russian by Inessa Medzhibovskaya

On Life: A Critical Edition

by Leo Tolstoy, edited by Inessa Medzhibovskaya, and translated from the Russian by Michael Denner and Inessa Medzhibovskaya

Ego-Histories

Singular Pasts: The “I” in Historiography

by Enzo Traverso, translated from the French by Adam Schoene

History and Human Flourishing

edited by Darrin M. McMahon

Reclaiming Native Identity in California

Too good for hollywood.

Aline MacMahon: Hollywood, the Blacklist, and the Birth of Method Acting

by John Stangeland

A Poem by Álvaro de Campos

Not how he wanted to be remembered.

Judgment and Mercy: The Turbulent Life and Times of the Judge Who Condemned the Rosenbergs

by Martin J. Siegel

Cats Galore Encore!: A New Compendium of Cultured Cats

by Susan Herbert

The Internet Is for Cats: How Animal Images Shape Our Digital Lives

by Jessica Maddox

Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life

by John Gray

All My Cats

by Bohumil Hrabal, translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson

Jeoffry: The Poet’s Cat

by Oliver Soden

‘Art’ or ‘Research’?

Issue details.

Series art Romy Blümel: Pebble , 2023

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The New York Review of Books June 9, 2022

For over 50 years, The New York Review of Books has been the place where the world's leading authors, scientists, educators, artists, and political leaders turn when they wish to engage in a spirited debate on literature, politics, art, and ideas with a small but influential audience that welcomes the challenge. Each issue addresses some of the most passionate political and cultural controversies of the day, and reviews the most engrossing new books and the ideas that illuminate them. Get The New York Review of Books digital magazine subscription today.

in this issue

Contributors.

GINIA BELLAFANTE is a columnist at The New York Times who has written extensively about inequality, culture, and urbanism. SARAH CHIHAYA is the author of the forthcoming Bibliophilia and a coauthor of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism. DAVID COLE is the National Legal Director of the ACLU and the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at the Georgetown University Law Center. ANNE ENRIGHT is a Professor of Creative Writing at University College Dublin. She has published seven novels, including, most recently, Actress. MARK FORD’s fourth book of poems, Enter, Fleeing, was published in 2018. SUE HALPERN is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a regular contributor to The New York Review. She is a Scholar in Residence at Middlebury. CHRISTINE HENNEBERG…

The End of Roe?

Aspirations In the windowless clinic where I work, the back hallway is lined with a row of small, square rooms. Inside each room is a desk, a computer screen, a box of tissues, two chairs, and little else. This is where the clinic counselors meet with patients who have come in for their abortions. In those small rooms, most of the day’s work is completed without me. The counselors have a set of questions they’re required to go through with each patient, but often the conversation goes off script. A woman starts talking about her life: a fight with her partner, her younger kid’s asthma, her sister’s wedding next week, her mother’s alcoholism. All of it is relevant, if it feels relevant to her; the counselor affirms this with an…

The Monsters in Cabinet 13

The Cabinet by Un-su Kim, translated from the Korean by Sean Lin Halbert. Angry Robot, 299 pp., $15.99 (paper) The Plotters by Un-su Kim, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell. Anchor, 292 pp., $16.95 (paper) Un-su Kim’s The Cabinet begins with an account of the peculiar fate of Ludger Sylbaris, one of those historical misfits whose story appears in compendia of strange-but-true curiosities, popular accounts of natural disasters, and travel guide sidebars. A native of Martinique, Sylbaris was imprisoned in the city of Saint-Pierre when Mount Pelee erupted on May 8, 1902. It was the deadliest volcanic eruption of the twentieth century, with a death toll unlikely to be matched in the future of human civilization. Saint-Pierre, typically called the “Paris of the Caribbean” in such accounts, sloped from the sea up the…

Must We Grow?

The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves by J.B. Mac Kinnon. Ecco, 322 pp., $28.99 Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less by Leidy Klotz. Flatiron, 290 pp., $28.99; $18.99 (paper) For about fifteen years, from the late 1990s through the early 2010s, my partner and I lived off the electrical grid in rural Colorado. Our two-room house, which he had built, was insulated with straw bales; it had a woodstove for heat, an on-demand propane-powered water heater, and a composting toilet. The plumbing—enough for a pair of sinks, a shower, and eventually a washing machine—was fed by an outdoor cistern, which was refilled every few months by a neighbor who owned a pump truck. A two-panel solar array powered our laptops and all the other gadgets we…

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Boomers Daily

The New York Review Of Books – June 20, 2024

Livelier Than the Living

In the Renaissance, reading became both a passion and a pose of detachment—for those who could afford it—from the pursuits of wealth and power.

A Marvelous Solitude: The Art of Reading in Early Modern Europe by Lina Bolzoni, translated from the Italian by Sylvia Greenup

Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England

Black Atlantics

The scholar Louis Chude-Sokei does the urgent work of reimagining the African diaspora as multiple diasporas.

Floating in a Most Peculiar Way by Louis Chude-Sokei

The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora by Louis Chude-Sokei

The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics by Louis Chude-Sokei

The best new books of June 2022

The month's most recommended reads, from lauded lit fic to seaside mysteries.

Summer is always a boom time for publishing. But even by the breezier standards of the season, not all beach reads are created equal: Below, we've selected 10 of the best tomes to pick up as the temperatures rise — from deeply reported nonfiction to future book-club classics, plus a few sandy outliers.

Horse , by Geraldine Brooks

The enduring, mystical bond between horse and human has pretty much become its own genre by now, but journalist-turned-novelist Geraldine Brooks ( March , Year of Wonders ) goes well beyond soft-focus Seabiscuit tales in her sprawling latest — a story spread across nearly two centuries and centered on the lost narrative of a real-life Black equestrian.

Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks , by Patrick Radden Keefe

A king of contemporary nonfiction — it's hard today to find a well-stocked modern bookshelf that doesn't contain his Say Nothing or Empire of Pain — Patrick Radden Keefe is also still a regular New Yorker staff writer. The wait for his next brick-sized exposé can be sated by the 12 previously published profiles compiled here covering rogues of all stripes, from a vintage-wine forger to El Chapo. (June 28)

Counterfeit , by Kirstin Chen

A good-girl lawyer named Ava Wong reconnects with her felonious college roommate, Winnie Fang, and tumbles headlong into an international scheme involving duped luxury handbags. Or does she? That's both the question and the trick in Kirstin Chin's debut — a clever, fizzy inversion of all kinds of Asian stereotypes, Crazy Rich and otherwise.

These Impossible Things , by Salma El-Wardany

Three best friends grapple with faith, romance, and identity in Salma El-Wardany's tender coming-of-age debut, already chosen for the Today book club. Malak, Kees, and Jenna are modern Muslim British girls, though the vagaries of fate and the choices they make send them spinning in and out of one another's orbits in a novel that doesn't trade its heavy subjects (rape, domestic violence, generational culture gaps as wide as the Thames) for beach-tote readability.

The Shore , by Katie Runde

The seaside of the title here is the Jersey Shore, but gym-tan-laundry is hardly the target in Katie Runde's deeply felt family saga, told largely via three female members of the Dunne clan. A father's growing brain tumor, a hectic real-estate business, and a blossoming queer romance all coalesce in one summer season of love, loss, and emotional awakening.

Cult Classic , by Sloane Crosley

It is one of Newton's less-discussed laws that a woman in New York City has a better chance of running into an ex when she is bra-less at a bodega buying oat milk than if she is standing inside his actual home, fully groomed. But the number of run-ins the recently engaged Lola keeps having with men from her past seems too bizarre to be called coincidence in Classic , the second novel from the wildly witty, why-isn't-she-your-best-friend-already brain behind The Clasp and I Was Told There'd Be Cake .

Hurricane Girl , by Marcy Dermansky

Tired of her flailing, failing L.A. existence, thirtysomething Allison decides to ditch it all for a bungalow of her own on the East Coast. When a Category 5 hurricane and a possible brain injury leave her life in shambles once again, Demansky ( Very Nice ) traces the fallout in caustically clever, refreshingly unfussy prose.

Girls They Write Songs About , by Carlene Bauer

The current crush of '90s nostalgia finds novel form in Carlene Bauer's heady, intimate tale of two young women who meet in the halcyon days of a New York music-magazine career circa 1997 — then turns its focus to all that follows when the coming-of-age glow gives way, inevitably, to the deeper shades and complications of grown adulthood.

Local Gone Missing , by Fiona Barton

Sometimes all you need is a smart, swift mystery you can knock out in one too-hot afternoon. Fiona Barton, the author of best-sellers The Widow and The Child , pivots here to a sleepy British seaside town where a detective on medical leave finds herself pulled back onto the job when two teenagers overdose at a local music festival, and a man goes missing in the night.

Ghost Lover , by Lisa Taddeo

Her 2019 nonfiction phenomenon Three Women is set to debut as a Showtime series this fall, starring Betty Gilpin, Shailene Woodley, and DeWanda Wise. In the meantime, Lisa Taddeo returns with more ruthless explorations of the feminine mystique in Ghost Lover , a raw, searching collection of nine short stories.

What We’re Reading This Summer

By The New Yorker

“ Groovy Bob ,” by Harriet Vyner

For your summer reading, it might be nice to go with something relatively light. This could mean a fast-paced contemporary novel whose specifics you’ll probably forget as soon as you finish it, but my preference is for the oral history, which can teach us something meaningful about a particular era from a variety of perspectives, with the bonus of some juicy gossip. One fine example of the genre that I picked up recently is “Groovy Bob,” by the writer and curator Harriet Vyner. Originally published in 1999 and reissued in expanded form in 2016, it features numerous interviews to present the life story of the art dealer Robert Fraser, whose self-titled gallery epitomized the newly hip, class-scrambling world of London in the mid-to-late nineteen-sixties. The son of a wealthy banker, Fraser was educated at Eton, and served as a young officer in Uganda in the late fifties. After a pit stop in New York, he returned to England, and over the next decade emerged as one of the country’s most important tastemakers, introducing British audiences to artists such as Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Dubuffet, while living faster and harder than almost any of his peers. (A tall order when your friends are the Rolling Stones.) The best-dressed man in any room, aloof and upper-class and ineffably cool, Fraser was also a junkie and a homosexual, a man who was preoccupied, in the words of Mick Jagger, with “bridging two worlds. And having a great time in the process, a very hedonistic time.” Living on the edge almost always has its price, however: in 1967, Fraser was busted for heroin possession while partying at Keith Richards’s country estate Redlands, and was imprisoned for months. After closing his gallery’s doors in 1969 (he was by all accounts a very bad businessperson), Fraser drifted, seeking enlightenment in India for a few years, then returning to his home country—and to hard drugs. He also opened a second iteration of his gallery—a much more indifferent endeavor, which he ran until his death, of AIDS -related causes, in 1986. This is not an especially happy story, but it’s also not a moralistic, cautionary tale. Rather, it presents a thick portrait of a now mostly forgotten man, who, for a short while, shined so bright that he was able to almost single-handedly define his cultural moment. Jagger again: “And that was his blaze, his quick swathe through London. He found a part.” — Naomi Fry

“ The Secret Lives of Church Ladies ,” by Deesha Philyaw

“My mother’s peach cobbler was so good, it made God himself cheat on his wife.” So begins “Peach Cobbler,” the fourth of nine beguiling short stories assembled in Deesha Philyaw’s collection, “The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.” Philyaw is a voyeur of a kind, training her gaze on the furtive activities of Black women. The milieus of the stories vary, but the mood threading them together is one of confession, sometimes in the theological sense. In “Peach Cobbler,” the daughter of a pastor’s mistress confuses the man with the grand authority he represents. “Eula” depicts two best friends who participate in a tradition of secret lovemaking on New Year’s Eve. Philyaw does not write erotica per se, but the thrill I get from turning over these short stories reminds me of first encountering, as a teen-ager, the pseudonymous Zane, the legendary writer of Black erotic fiction. Throughout the collection, Philyaw catches her characters in the midst of doing something “bad,” by which I mean, in the midst of inventing their own personal freedom. — Doreen St. Félix

“ The Europeans ,” by Orlando Figes

A good biography can be just as escapist as a novel, immersing the reader in the minutiae of a time, place, and character other than her own. Orlando Figes’s triple biography, “The Europeans,” illustrates the lives of his three subjects—the theatre manager Louis Viardot, the singer Pauline Viardot, and the novelist Ivan Turgenev—but also captures the galvanizing atmosphere of the nineteenth-century culture industry as Europe cohered into a unified entity. Gossip is the book’s hook: the Viardots and Turgenev are enmeshed in a long-term love triangle, with the older Louis tacitly accepting Pauline and Ivan’s enduring affair. Pauline, however, never seems to fully return the novelist’s love, and in old age the relationship settles into an emotionally intimate friendship. In the meantime, the three quarrel, split up across national borders, and cohabitate in various villas, ranging in location from the cosmopolitan German spa town Baden-Baden to Paris. In our own chaotic era, it’s comforting to read about how the throuple’s members persevered with their art amid various personal and geopolitical dramas. Figes is particularly good at pinpointing how the technological innovations of the century changed the world his subjects inhabited. The Viardots frequented cultural centers that became stops on the increasingly crowded U.K.-European tourist circuit, a beaten track reinforced by guidebooks produced by the London publisher John Murray—which, Figes writes, “did more than anything to standardize the experience of foreign travel.” Trains likewise brought disparate places—and the élites who lived there—closer together. At one point, Turgenev takes a disappointingly rainy and lonely seaside holiday in Ventnor, U.K., where he begins writing “Fathers and Sons.” Figes memorably describes the scene: “Turgenev sat down at the writing table in his room and began his masterpiece. He had nothing else to do.” — Kyle Chayka

“ Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black ,” by Cookie Mueller

Semiotext(e)’s new, expanded edition of Cookie Mueller’s 1990 essay collection “Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black” is a portal into a world of radical freedom—into Mueller’s dive-bar pinball machine of a life and into her mind, thrown open to anything, “so open that at times I hear the wind whistling through it.” Mueller was, among other things, a Dreamlander, acting in multiple John Waters films (Waters described her as a “Janis Joplin-meets-redneck-hippie with a little bit of glamour drag thrown in”), an exotic dancer, a coke dealer, a house cleaner, a sailor, an “unwed welfare mother,” and, perhaps above all else, a writer of cracked, profound integrity and adventure. The volume begins when Mueller is fifteen, juggling two lovers: a hospitalized alcoholic teen-age boy, and a girl named Gloria, soon to be dead when rogue silicone from her implants reaches her heart. By eighteen, she’s in Haight-Ashbury, where a single day contains a run-in with the Manson girls (“like ducks quacking over corn”), an LSD-capping party, a demon-summoning ceremony, a Grateful Dead concert at San Quentin State Prison, a rape at gunpoint (she tricks her rapist into giving her a ride home and then jumps out of the car screaming, “That man just raped me”), and a dawn nightcap of cocaine, meth, and philosophical musings about the lost city of Atlantis. She moves to Provincetown, collects food stamps, and assembles a life of marginal glamour in a barely insulated saltbox filled with fellow-Dreamlanders. Nothing really scares her until childbirth, an event that makes her see a blood moon, constellations rising in fast motion, her body sawed in half. But by the time she’s in New York, in her thirties, she’s figured out that she just has to get home by dawn to wake her son, Max, up for school. Before Mueller died at age forty from AIDS -related pneumonia, she wrote a series of “fables”—one’s titled “I Hear America Sinking or a Suburban Girl Who Is Naive and Stupid Finds Her Reward”—and an unsound, affecting health-advice column for The East Village Eye . (In one of the installments of the latter, she urges readers worried about the AIDS epidemic to be compassionate and to “relax.” By way of precautions, she advises, “Keep your body very strong and don’t forget your sense of humor.”) Mueller’s unflappability, her refusal of stasis and self-pity, her hunger for beauty, her readiness to find it where few else would look—all of it adds up into a singular code for living, in which the worst thing a person could do is flinch. — Jia Tolentino

“ Manhunt ,” by Gretchen Felker-Martin

For the past several years, for assorted, fairly obvious reasons, I’ve been drawn to stories of apocalypse. After the first few bleak novels, I realized that what drew me to these worlds was not some desire for depictions of chaos; rather, I crave their orderliness. The true fantasy of these post-catastrophe narratives is the imposition of new rules, within which new ways of living can be derived like mathematical proofs: the infection travels thusly, the infrastructure has fallen in such and such a way, the powerful baddies are organized like so; therefore, the methods of survival turn out to be this, and that, and the other. In “Manhunt,” by a mile the most gripping and visceral apocalypse novel I’ve read during this disaster binge, a raging virus transforms anyone with a testosterone-heavy endocrine system into a ferocious rutting creature. Trying to stay both alive and sane in this wasteland are two trans women, Fran and Beth, who hunt zombified men in order to consume their testicles as a source of desperately needed estrogen. (“Just pretend it’s one of those fancy chocolates with the gold foil. You know. A Ferrero Rocher,” Fran urges herself, as she downs a gland. “Pretend they’re oysters on the half shell.”) Fran and Beth, in turn, are being hunted by fascistic, heavily armed militias of anti-trans women, while simultaneously trying to avoid conscription into the private labor armies of wealthy “bunker brats,” who are riding out the apocalypse behind fortified walls. Fran and Beth fight, kill, get injured, and fuck stupendously, all of it described in extraordinarily physical prose that swings from poetic to hilarious to repulsive, often within the same breath. I’m a fairly squeamish person—really, there are few more lightweight—and there were times when the intensity of the language and the barrage of bodily fluids demanded that I take breaks for brain cleansing. (I suspect that Felker-Martin would take my regular blanch-outs as a compliment: “I write the most disgusting books in the English language,” she announces proudly in her Patreon bio.) Still, every time I thought that I couldn’t go further, I found myself drawn back: “Manhunt” is a filthy, furious delight; within its tense, gruesome premise live roundly human characters, with big, unwieldy emotions. It’s a shockingly tender exploration of genders and bodies, of violence as a part of nature, of the way love is a tool of survival. — Helen Rosner

“ The School for Good Mothers ,” by Jessamine Chan, and “ Elsewhere ,” by Alexis Schaitkin

The warehouses of literature are full of wicked mothers, but the bad-mom-as-antihero trend feels more recent. Its trailblazers were memoirists and novelists—Rachel Cusk, Doris Lessing—who confronted the bad mom’s haters while pleading her case (which went something like, you try gentle parenting while your kid is flinging oatmeal at the cat). But lately I’ve been thinking about the migration of “bad” moms into speculative fiction, especially as the Supreme Court’s discarding of the constitutional right to abortion means that pregnant women will be increasingly surveilled and criminalized. Alexis Schaitkin’s “Elsewhere,” for instance, pictures a secluded town where mothers periodically vanish into the clouds. What draws “the affliction” to some women but not others is unknown, but it may relate to the quality of their mothering—too reckless, too excessive, too meek, too feral. “The School for Good Mothers,” by Jessamine Chan, makes a grimmer proposition. The protagonist, Frida, a Chinese American woman, is sent to a reëducation facility after leaving her toddler at home alone for a couple of hours. Frida is given a jumpsuit and incessantly monitored; every gesture, tone of voice, and action must meet a standard of parental perfection—a standard by which Frida’s kisses, for example, are said to “lack a fiery core of maternal love.” The book is a bleak and scalding satire of the cult of selfless caregiving, and also a soulful meditation on the bond between parents and children. Something mysterious in Chan’s characters, even the automated ones, resists social engineering; this uncontrollability makes them interesting. For me, the novel reanimated an obvious truth: that personality— life—inheres in the decisions we make, and that we are not ourselves, not alive, when we cannot choose. — Katy Waldman

“ None Like Us ,” by Stephen Best

The literary critic Stephen Best begins his 2018 book, “None Like Us,” in notice of a “communitarian impulse” in Black studies. “It announces itself in the assumption that in writing about the black past ‘we’ discover ‘our’ history,” he writes. “It registers in the suggestion that what makes black people black is their continued navigation of an ‘afterlife of slavery.’ ” It could be called melancholic, an identity sustained by exclusion—from history, from politics, the hallowed sites of culture. Best is queasy about this, not for its mood but, rather, the presumption of affirmation to be found on the other side of subjection. Instead, he finds inspiration in works—El Anatsui’s sculptures, Toni Morrison’s “ A Mercy ”—that enact “a kind of thought that literary critics are not yet willing to entertain,” that is, “freedom from constraining conceptions of blackness as authenticity, tradition, and legitimacy; of history as inheritance, memory, and social reproduction; of diaspora as kinship, belonging, and dissemination.” In his study of these texts, Best picks apart the tropes that are often treated as foregone conclusions: that the heirs of a people made chattel would incur and even embrace the terms foisted upon them, that the first-person plural of Black studies is monolithic. I came to this book with an honest portion of chagrin: How often have I intoned a word like “community” in my appraisal of a novel or television show, taking that word for granted as one that exists with some definite sort of racial continuity rather than something to be powerfully disarticulated? The title and provocation of the book come from the abolitionist David Walker, who, in his “ Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World ,” first published in 1829, prayed that “none like us ever may live again until time shall be no more.” Disaffiliation pairs well with a spritz, I’ve learned. — Lauren Michele Jackson

“ Willful Disregard ,” by Lena Andersson

When readers meet Ester Nilsson, the heroine of Lena Andersson’s 2013 novel, “Willful Disregard,” they are told that she perceives reality “with devastating precision.” Ester is a writer: serious about her work and her choices, dedicated with earnest clarity to the life of the mind. Everything goes to hell when she agrees to deliver a lecture on an artist named Hugo Rask, and subsequently falls in love with him. Even Ester’s vegetarianism crumbles in the course of their abortive courtship.

“Willful Disregard,” published in Sarah Death’s 2015 English translation, follows Ester in her desperate attempts to comprehend what is going on between her and the artist who is failing to love her back. If, in “I Love Dick,” romantic abjection yields confrontational art, in “Willful Disregard” it yields awkward texts. This outcome is no less harrowing for being more familiar, and, in Andersson’s cool, observant prose, it’s possible to examine the mental gymnastics of thwarted desire with a rigor seldom available to those in Ester’s condition (or to their confidantes, who are given voice in the book as Ester’s “girlfriend chorus”). The results are ruthlessly lucid and funny.

“She had made up her mind not to ring him,” Andersson writes, after Ester and Hugo spend a night together. “Admittedly she thought it was strange that one would not want perpetual contact with the person with whom one had just embarked on a loving relationship, but she had to be flexible.” She calls, of course. He doesn’t answer. “There are natural explanations for everything,” she thinks. For example: “He felt secure with her and did not need to keep telling her what he was doing, or making contact, because they were in continuous spiritual contact anyway.” — Molly Fischer

“ Red Comet ,” by Heather Clark

I bought Heather Clark’s “Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath” last winter, by which point it had appeared on year-end lists and was a Pulitzer finalist. I’ve wanted to dive in ever since but just couldn’t find the right moment to leap headlong into its eleven hundred and fifty-two pages. Then summer rolled around, and I found myself craving a smart book I could live in for months—the literary equivalent of a bottomless Negroni. A Big Biography, such as “Red Comet,” is a dense, self-contained world, one you can unpack your suitcase inside, and I knew that, once I did venture into it, it would totally consume me. This is more or less what has happened over the past few weeks. I am now so deep into “Red Comet” that it has become a little slice of my personality; I feel an urgent need to press it into other people’s hands so that we can discuss it.

“Red Comet” is not the first Plath biography I’ve read. My first was actually a 1994 meta-biography called “ The Silent Woman ,” by the late, great Janet Malcolm. Malcolm’s book, which grew out of an article she wrote for The New Yorker , is about the fact that nobody had ever written a truly great Plath study, as the task presents a thicket of competing interests, family resentments, and obstructionist estate intervention. After Plath’s suicide, in 1963, her husband, Ted Hughes, from whom she was separated at the time, and Hughes’s sister Olwyn managed her archive and her legacy, and as such any scholar wanting to write a Plath biography had to go through them in order to get permission to use the materials. This process skewed the works that emerged: those who coöperated wrote books that were highly favorable to Hughes’s side of the story, and those who didn’t wrote anemic volumes that lacked juicy insight. Malcolm’s brilliant book, which is not just about Plath’s many biographers but about how it is nearly impossible to write a truly phenomenal biography of anyone, is one of my favorites because it lays bare all the manipulations and compromises that go into any work of nonfiction. It also put me off Plath biographies (and there are always Plath biographies) for many years, because I was convinced that they were going to be either toothless duds or score-settling screeds. And then came “Red Comet,” with all its fanfare, which had taken Clark more than nine years to complete.

What Clark has accomplished is staggering: she manages to put Plath’s story back into the context of her life, rather than through her fights with Hughes or the tragic mythology swirling around her death. The book is urgent and alive and provocative and confident—which is exactly how Plath’s poetry feels. In the introduction, Clark writes, of Plath, “She was determined to live as fully as possible—to write, to travel, to cook, to draw, to love as much and as often as she could. She was, in the words of a close friend, ‘operatic’ in her desires, a ‘Renaissance woman’ molded as much by Romantic sublimity as New England stoicism.” The same could be said for Clark’s book—it is an opera, epic and sumptuous.

When I come to the end of “Red Comet,” it will feel like the end of a beautiful trip away, and I am not ready to go home yet. Fortunately, there are always Plath’s books to read—or to listen to. My other summer suggestion? Download Maggie Gyllenhaal reading “ The Bell Jar .” You won’t regret it. — Rachel Syme

“ The Fugitivities ,” by Jesse McCarthy

American literature is peopled with runaways—those brave, brazen, or simply compromised enough to abdicate their responsibilities and take to the road. Few contemporary writers have explored the impulse with more nuance and verve than the scholar Jesse McCarthy, whose début novel, “The Fugitivities,” follows a young Black teacher in the early two-thousands from disillusionment in Brooklyn to doubt and revelation abroad. Jonah, like his Biblical namesake, is a man who abandons his mission, so demoralized by teaching students condemned to poverty that he decides to quit classroom and country for Brazil. He squanders a small inheritance from a respectable uncle on his open-ended adventure—which, of course, only sharpens his alienation. Just before his departure, he crosses paths with a retired basketball star whose life took an opposite trajectory, away from his great love in Paris toward a responsible existence mentoring troubled youth in New York. In their parallel stories, the Black intellectual’s crisis of faith meets the guilty anomie of the American expatriate. McCarthy’s spiralling, exquisitely cadenced prose is a shot of adrenaline, enlivening an ambitious twenty-first-century sentimental education that recalls Ben Lerner, Ralph Ellison, and Roberto Bolaño. — Julian Lucas

“ Love’s Work ,” by Gillian Rose

I am teaching a class in the autumn called “Love and Other Useless Pursuits.” It will begin, dutifully, with Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, and then move swiftly through my favorite writers and thinkers on this thorny subject: d’Aragona, Cavendish, Stendhal, Goethe, Emerson, Proust, Woolf, Barnes, Baldwin, Beauvoir, Lacan, and Barthes. Deciding when and how to end it was the hardest part, and the handful of texts I considered selecting as the final book—Lauren Berlant’s “ Desire/Love ,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “ A Dialogue on Love ,” Leo Bersani’s “ Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art ”—are still spread forlornly around my writing table. Where I landed was Gillian Rose’s “Love’s Work,” written while Rose, a great and uncompromising social philosopher, was dying of ovarian cancer. I wish that I knew why I made the choice I did; I cannot account for it in full. Certainly, it has something to do with her voice, which I find magnetic—elegant, unflinching, irreverent, and ferociously principled in its discussion of desire and affliction. It has something, too, to do with the resolve with which Rose faces both her own death and the deaths of those she has loved, or could have imagined loving: friends who have died from AIDS , relatives killed in the camps. But, more than anything else, I think that I wanted to end the class on Rose’s idea that love’s work is coextensive with the work of thinking and the work of criticism. Despite what advice columns and self-help books might teach, love, like criticism, is a peculiarly autocratic pursuit. One authorizes one’s own judgments and must live with the consequences. Sometimes—most of the time, some would say—we get it wrong. We err on the side of indulgence or cruelty, blind to (blinded by?) our own power. Yet to fail is not to fall into despair. Failing in love, and in criticism, lets us gain a sense of ethical relations: we perceive the conditionality of our judgments, and embrace our capacity to forgive and to be forgiven. Rose puts this better than I can hope to, in lines I often repeat to friends: “There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy. To be at someone’s mercy is dialectical damage: they may be merciful and they may be merciless. Yet each party, woman, man, the child in each, and their child, is absolute power as well as absolute vulnerability. You may be less powerful than the whole world, but you are always more powerful than yourself.” — Merve Emre

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34 Most Anticipated New June 2022 Book Releases by Genre

There are so many amazing June 2022 book releases that it was hard to narrow it down. We looked through too many book releases to count but we chose the books that we are most excited to read.

June is the start of summer reading. There are so many amazing romances, fiction, and thrillers this month. If historical fiction, fantasy or YA are more your speed, we have books for you as well.

For more summer reading, look at the Beach Read Hub for all things related to summer reading or the Ultimate List of Beach Reads 2022 for the latest vacation reading.

*Post contains affiliate links. Purchases made through links result in a small commission to us at no cost to you. Some books have been gifted. All opinions are our own.

Table of Contents

June 2022 Historical Fiction Book Releases

The Last Dress and more June 2022 Book Releases

The Last Dress from Paris by Jade Beer

Genre : Historical Fiction

Plot: From London in 2017 to post war France in 1952, this is a story that starts with a priceless Dior dress to reveal secrets. When Granny Sylvie asks her Granddaughter Lucille, Lucille is happy to help. What she finds are questions that will change everything.

If you Love historical fiction, we have a list of the Ultimate list of Historical Fiction Books

Romance book releases for june 2022.

Meant to Be Mine by Hannah Orenstein

Genre : Romance

Plot: Edie Meyer has always known the exact day she would meet the love of her life. Grandma Gloria has a vision about meeting her won husband and his since predicted the day every single family member would meet their match. But what her soul mate is not the perfect man she envisioned?

Stuck with You by Ali Hazelwood

Plot: From the best-selling author of The Love Hypothesis comes this novella about Mara, Hannah and Sadie. They are friends who are women of science. Logically Sadie knows that things can change in an instant but, she never expected to be stuck in an elevator for hours with the man who broke her heart.

Nora Goes Off Script and more June 2022 Book Releases

Nora Goes Off Script by Annabel Monaghan

Plot: Nora is a romance channel screenwriter whose life takes a turn when her husband leaves her and their two children. Nora uses the pain to write the a script that is put on the big screen. When the lead of the movie offers her one thousand dollars a day to stay with her, life takes an unexpected turn.

Island Time by Georgia Clark

Plot: From, the author of It Had To Be You comes a brand new queer romance. The Kelly’s and the Lees have nothing in common other than the fact that their daughters are married. When they find themselves stranded on an island after a volcano eruption, they will discover that it is never too late to change your destiny.

How to Fake it in Hollywood by Ava Wilder

Plot: A talented Hollywood starlet and a reclusive A-lister enter into a fake relationship . . . and discover that their feelings might be more than a PR stunt in this sexy debut for fans of Beach Read and The Unhoneymooners .

On Rotation and more June 2022 Book Releases

On Rotation by Shirlene Obuobi

Plot: Angela Appiah has spent her life living up to the expectations of her parents as the perfect immigrant daughter. She is in medical school with the appropriate boyfriend and friends her parents approve of. When he boyfriend dumps her, her friends desert her and she bombs a major exam, her life comes crashing down. Can she live a life of her dreams rather than the life her parents dreamed for her?

Fake it Till you Bake it and more June 2022 Book Releases

Fake it Till you Bake it by Jamie Wesley

Plot: A reality star and a cupcake-baking football player pretend to be a couple in order to save his bakery in this sweet and sexy romance from Jamie Wesley, Fake It Till You Bake It.

American Royalty by Tracey Livesay

Plot: In this dangerously sexy rom-com that evokes the real-life romance between Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan Markle, a prince who wants to live out of the spotlight falls for a daring American rapper who turns his life, and the palace, upside down.

Most Anticipated June 2022 Fiction Book Releases

Gilt by Jamie Brenner

Genre : Fiction

Plot: From the acclaimed author of Blush, and our good friend, comes a new book by Jamie Brenner. This novel is about a perfect diamond, a family empire and the secrets that threaten to take the family down.

You can check out our interview with Jamie about her previous book, Blush right here .

Out of the Clear Blue Sky and more June 2022 Book Releases

Out of the Clear Blue Sky by Kristan Higgins

Genre : Woman’s Fiction

Plot: Lillie Silva did not think being an empty nester would mean that her husband would abruptly leave when her son left the house. Now, Lillie has to learn to navigate the next chapter of her life and she just might find some unexpected surprises along the way.

Counterfeit by Kristin Chen

Plot: Ava Wong’s life seems perfect from the outside but, the reality is that it is crumbling. When an old college roommate shows up and is dripping with luxury handbags, Ava is intrigued. When Winnie lets her in on her brilliant counterfeited bag scheme, all is going splendidly until Winnie Disappears.

The Messy Lives of Book People and more June 2022 Book Releases

The Messy Lives of Book People by Phaedra Patrick

Plot: Liv Green is a maid who can barely make ends meet. When the avid reader lander her dream job- cleaning for her favorite author, Essie Starling, she is shocked to learn that they author is a recluse who talks to nobody other than her. When Essie dies and asks Liv to complete her final book, Liv must step into Essie’s shoes to uncover past secrets.

The Beach Trap and more June 2022 Book Releases

The Beach Trap by Ali Brady

Plot: Kat Steiner and Black O’Neill met at camp when they were 12 and became best friends until they learned that they were half sisters. They never spoke again until their father died 15 years later and left them both the family beach house in Florida. They are forced to come together and come to terms with their past and the fact that they are sisters.

Love & Other Great Expectations by Becky Dean

Plot: An American girl embarks on a competitive scavenger hunt in England—and along the way, meets up with a bookish British boy who can’t help her with the clues . . . but might make the trip take some unexpected turns.

The Hotel Nantucket by Elin Hilderbrand

Genre : Women’s Fiction

Plot: When Lizbet Keaton is names the new general manager of the Hotel Nantucket, she hopes that this is the beginning of her second act. The hotel was once a Gilded Age gem and is now run down. With the history of the hotel, multiple viewpoints, and the hope for redemption, this sounds like a perfect summer read.

Ghost Lover by Lisa Taddeo

Genre : Fictional Short Stories

Plot: From Lisa Taddeo, #1 New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of Three Women and “our most eloquent and faithful chronicler of human desire” ( Esquire ), Ghost Lover is an electrifying collection of fearless and ferocious short stories.

Best New Thrillers/ Mysteries for June 2022

A Botanist’s Guide to Parties and Poisons by Kate Kharvi

Genre : Mystery

Plot: Saffron is the newest research assistant at the University College in London and to say her male colleagues are not pleased is putting it lightly. When at a dinner for the school, one of the professors’ wives dies from an unknown poison. Saffron must use her knowledge in botany to prove her mentor is innocent of murder. And perhaps, she can find love in the process.

Can’t Look Away by Carola Lovering

Genre : Suspense Novel

Plot: A From the author of Tell Me Lies and Too Good to Be True comes Carola Lovering’s Can’t Look Away , a sexy suspense novel about the kind of addictive, obsessive love that keeps you coming back––no matter how hard you try to look away .

The Lies I Tell by Julie Clark

Genre : Thriller

Plot: Kat Roberts has been waiting to find the women who turned her life up-side-down ten years ago. Meg/ Maggie/ Melody the con artist will become whatever you need in your life and then take it all. She has finally returned and Kat is determined to expose her.

The House Across the Lake by Riley Sager

Plot: Casey Fletcher has retreated to her family’s lake house in Vermont after being widowed. She spends her time drinking and watching there perfect couple across the lake. But when Katherine goes missing after the two women strike up a friendship, Casey is determined to find her.

The Woman in the Library: A Novel by Sulari Gentill

Plot: Four women are sitting together in the reading room of the Boston Public Library when there is a scream. The library is locked down until the threat is contained. The women strike up conversation and the story takes some twists and turns.

Most Anticipated June 2022 Fantasy/ Sci-fi Book Releases

Lapvona: A Novel by Ottessa Moshfegh

Genre : Historical Fantasy

Plot: NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2022 BY The Millions, Harper’s Bazaar, New York Magazine, LitHub, AV Club, and more In a village in a medieval fiefdom buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot of a power struggle that puts all manner of faith to a savage test, in a spellbinding novel that represents Ottessa Moshfegh’s most exciting leap yet

Ordinary Monsters by J.M Miro

Plot: In 1882 Victorian London, two children are haunted by a man made of smoke. Charlie’s Body heals itself and Marlowe shines with light. A female detective is tasked with keeping them safe so that they can keep the world safe.or

Non-fiction June 2022 Book Releases

Liking Myself Back: An Influencer’s Journey from Self-Doubt to Self-Acceptance by Jacey Duprie

Genre : Non-fiction

Plot: Entrepreneur and lifestyle influencer Jacey Duprie shares her inspiring journey of going from farm girl to fashion icon and her lessons about personal growth and self-made success The

Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks by Patrick Radden Keefe

Plot: From the prize-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing , twelve enthralling stories of skulduggery and intrigue by one of the most decorated journalists of our time .

Best YA June 2022 Book Releases

A Year to the Day by Robins Benway and more June 2022 Book Releases

A Year to the Day by Robin Benway

Genre : YA Fiction

Plot: National Book Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Robin Benway returns with a story of love, loss, and sisterhood reminiscent of I’ll Give You the Sun and Every Day . Told in reverse chronological order, A Year to the Day will claim a permanent home in your heart.

Check out our review of Far From the Tree and More Feel Good Books!

The Song that Moves the Sun by Anna Bright

Genre : YA Fantasy

Plot: This sweeping YA fantasy romance full of star-crossed love, complex female friendship, and astrological magic is perfect for fans of Laini Taylor, Alexandra Bracken, and V.E. Schwab. From the acclaimed author of The Beholder.

Our Crooked Hearts by Melissa Albert

Plot: Ivy has started her summer vacation with an accident and now weird things have started happening. Years ago, when Dana was 16, her supernatural gifts began to bloom. Now, Ivy and Dana’s stories come together when they face the dark forces they never should have messed with.

Blood and Moonlight by Erin Beaty

Plot: In Erin Beaty’s fantasy mystery-thriller, Blood and Moonlight , an orphan with a secret, magical sight gets caught between a mysterious genius and the serial killer he’s hunting.

A Mirror Mended by Alix. E Harrow

Plot: Zinnia, a former Sleeping Beauty, has been spending her time rescuing other Sleeping Beauties and is starting to feel stuck when she sees Snow White’s evil queen looking for a different ending to her story.

Blade Breaker by Victoria Aveyard

Plot: In the sequel to Victoria Aveyard’s instant #1 New York Times bestselling Realm Breaker, a divided world must rally, an unstoppable enemy must be defeated, and the fate of the world rests on a blade’s edge.

If you love YA fantasy, we have a list of the Ultimate list of YA Fantasy

What june 2022 book releases are you adding to your to read list, looking for more 2022 book releases you can check out our new release hub for all the new releases.

Co-Founder and Creative Director

As a mother of two boys, Kirsten rediscovered her life-long love for reading while choosing appropriate books for her children. She started this website with Jackie to share their passion for literacy with other moms and kids. She uses her years of experience in marketing and public relations to create quarterly magazines, implement social media strategy, and ensure the website content is relevant and beautiful.

The 23 Best New Books of June 2024

Author: Michael Giltz

Here are the 23 best books of June, 2024. It may be the dog days of summer, when you seek refuge at the movies or a refreshing salad . But it’s always a great time to be a book lover. Exciting thrillers about exploding volcanoes (just as a volcano erupts in Iceland), a celebration of Joni Mitchell (still performing, even at 80 and after a stroke), a remix of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (this time focusing on Mary Jane, the red-headed girl Huck couldn’t stop thinking about), science books about life underwater (it’s very noisy, apparently!), new novels by favorites like Tracy Chevalier and so much more. And those are just the books coming out in June! (Check out our picks for the 60 best books of the entire summer here.) So let’s get reading. At the head of the Parade is…

Courtesy of Little, Brown and Company

1. Eruption by Michael Crichton and James Patterson

Blockbuster author Michael Crichton died in 2008, leaving behind a legacy of iconic bestsellers like Jurassic Park and the memoir that became the TV series ER. No surprise: he worked on ideas right up to the end. His widow wanted one in particular to be completed. But who could match Crichton’s immense popularity and talent for engaging audiences? Enter blockbuster author James Patterson. So here comes Eruption, the nail-biter about a volcano poised to destroy the big island of Hawai’i–and the military secrets hidden there which could make this natural disaster even more devastating. It’s a collaboration between two writers on a page-turner almost genetically engineered for summer reading pleasure. Eruption by Michael Crichton and James Patterson ($32; Little, Brown and Company) Buy now on Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

Enlightenment, Soldier Sailor, The Throne book cover images

Courtesy of Mariner Books, Scribner, Europa Editions

2. Enlightenment by Sarah Perry 3. Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy 4. The Throne by Franco Bernini

Three works of acclaimed fiction from across the pond. In Enlightenment, two astronomers from different generations are absorbed by their work but wrestle with how to square the science with their Baptist faiths and their tightly defined lives in a small town in Essex, England. Author Sarah Perry broke out in the US with her last book The Essex Serpent. This one should prove that success was just the beginning. Irish author Claire Kilroy puts motherhood at the heart of her acclaimed debut Soldier Sailor . Hugely praised in the UK, this book captures the complex and daunting life of a new mother, how a child (and playgrounds and supermarkets) become the center of your life and how destabilizing and challenging it can be to maintain a sense of self. The mother’s marriage is rocky, the child is all-consuming in their needs and it’s…a lot. If you loved Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, dive into The Throne, an Italian historical novel with the same verve of a thriller while bringing the past to life. It’s the first of a trilogy about the 16th century thinker and provocateur Niccolò Machiavelli. Enlightenment by Sarah Perry ($28; Mariner Books) Pre-order now on Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy ($26; Scribner) Pre-order now on Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org The Throne by Franco Bernini ($30; Europa Editions) Pre-order now on Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

Related: 15 Books You Must Read If You're Obsessed With Taylor Swift's New Album

Traveling: On The Path Of Joni Mitchell, Too Much, Too Young: The 2 Tone Records Story book cover images

Courtesy of Dey Street Books, Akashic Books

5. Traveling: On The Path Of Joni Mitchell by Ann Powers 6. Too Much, Too Young: The 2 Tone Records Story by Daniel Rachel

Two music books that add insights to a great artist and a great movement. Joni Mitchell is always and forever in the mix when debating the greatest artists of all time. Her legacy is rich and even at 80–and after a stroke!–Mitchell is still adding to it. NPR critic Ann Powers offers a deep dive into the work and life of Mitchell. No straightforward biography, Powers talks to everyone she can, charts the life journey of this singular artist and her impact on the world. And it’s all done in a freedom, jazzy style Mitchell herself would approve. Maybe you know artists like Madness (“Our House”), The English Beat (aka The Beat) with “Mirror in the Bathroom” or The Specials, who delivered one of the greatest protest songs of all time with “Free Nelson Mandela.” But any fan of pop history and music in general will love Too Much Too Young. It’s the story of the iconic UK label 2 Tone Records, which helped pioneer the musical genre ska and a generation of politically active, racially diverse acts starting in 1979. They changed the face of music and their story is hailed by many UK outlets as one of the best books of the year. Just be prepared to start streaming a lot of great music while you’re reading this one. Traveling: On The Path Of Joni Mitchell by Ann Powers ($35; Dey Street Books) Pre-order now on Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org Too Much, Too Young: The 2 Tone Records Story by Daniel Rachel ($32.95; Akashic Books) Pre-order now on Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

Little Shrew, Adventures of Mary Jane, Brownstone book cover images

Courtesy of Kids Can Press, Delacorte Press, Versify

7. Little Shrew by Akiko Miyakoshi 8. Adventures of Mary Jane by Hope Jahren 9. Brownstone by Samuel Teer & Mar Julia

Three great books anyone can savor, including a picture book geared towards kids, a remixed classic for middle school audiences and a graphic novel for teens. Little Shrew is a delightful look at the daily doings of a shrew, with tasks at hand and friends coming to call. Low-key, charming and beautifully drawn by creator Akiko Miyakoshi. Author Hope Jahren read Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and wanted to know more about Mary Jane, the red-headed girl Huck couldn’t stop thinking about it. So she told Mary Jane’s story herself, even taking care to nod to Twain but not including “The” in the title. Huck Finn has inspired two great books this year, so far: Percival Everett’s James (expanding on the inner life of the enslaved man who escapes on a raft with Huck) and now Jahren’s Adventures of Mary Jane. The graphic novel Brownstone tells of the summer that teenager Almudena spends with her Guatemalan father when her white mother goes away on a trip. One problem among many? He speaks Spanish at a rapper’s clip and she doesn’t really speak it at all. While he (and his neighbors) all voice their opinions on how she should dress, talk and think, Almudena struggles to listen to her own heart. Little Shrew by Akiko Miyakoshi ($19.99; Kids Can Press) Pre-order now on Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org Adventures of Mary Jane by Hope Jahren ($19.99; Delacorte Press) Pre-order now on Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org Brownstone by Samuel Teer & Mar Julia ($26.99; Versify) Pre-order now on Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Underwater book cover image

Courtesy of Crown

10 Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water by Amorina Kingdon

Imagine life underwater. Chances are you envision a silent, beautiful world, perhaps with a musical score from a James Cameron Avatar film or an old Jacques Cousteau documentary to enliven things. But essentially, you imagine it’s quiet. Not so fast. In the science book Sing Like Fish, author Amorina Kingdon tells how sound is essential to life underwater, from the singing of whales to the noisy chatterings of snapping shrimp, sound is everywhere. Not to mention the eruptions of underwater volcanoes and earthquakes! Kingdon paints the picture compellingly, along with warnings on how the noise pollution of humans and their shipping and such threaten this delicate balance. Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water by Amorina Kingdon ($30; Crown) Pre-order now on Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

Shanghai; Farewell, Amethystine; Clete book cover images

Courtesy of Scribner, Mulholland Books, Atlantic Monthly Press

11. Shanghai by Joseph Kanon 12. Farewell, Amethystine by Walter Mosley 13. Clete by James Lee Burke

Three works of mystery and suspense by three of the best. Joseph Kanon ( The Good German, Los Alamos ) makes Shanghai a Casablanca- worthy setting for World War II-era intrigue. It’s 1938 and some Jews fleeing Nazi Germany’s violence towards them ended up in Shanghai. It’s a Western outpost inside China and all anyone wants to do is get letters of transit–I mean, book passage on one of the cruise ships by Lloyd that offer a rare way to escape. Start casting the movie version now. A new novel by Walter Mosley is always welcome, especially when it centers on his brilliant creation Easy Rawlins. It’s 1970 and a rare moment of stability for this family man…so you know that won’t last. Enter Amethystine, a love from his past who needs the private investigator’s help. Another chapter in Mosley’s magisterial history of life in the US for a Black man. Author James Lee Burke offers up the latest in his widely praised, best-selling books about Detective Dave Robicheaux. But fans will be intrigued to know this time it’s his longtime partner Clete Purcel who takes center stage. Mexican drug cartels, brutal murders and a dangerous new drug all play a part in Burke’s 24th novel in the series. Shanghai by Joseph Kanon ($28.99; Scribner) Pre-order now on Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org Farewell, Amethystine by Walter Mosley ($30; Mulholland Books) Pre-order now on Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org Clete by James Lee Burke ($28; Atlantic Monthly Press) Pre-order now on Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

The Glassmaker, Shelterwood, Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books book cover images

Courtesy of Viking,Ballantine Books, William Morrow

14. The Glassmaker by Tracy Chevalier 15. Shelterwood by Lisa Wingate 16. Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books by Kirsten Miller

Three works of fiction that are serious, moving or just plain hilarious. In The Glassmaker, the author of Girl With A Pearl Earring returns with another work of historical fiction. It begins in Venice during the 15th century and follows the Russo family for the next 600 years. From the young woman who goes against convention to master the craft of a glassblower (and saves them financially) through centuries of change, Tracy Chevalier tells of the hardships they overcome, like plague, war and–most challenging of all–an invasion of tourists. Lisa Wingate also spans decades in her historical novel Shelterwood. This emotional story begins in the Oklahoma of 1909, when an eleven year old child named Olive flees with a six year old Choctaw girl to escape a man of cruel intentions. They head for a lawless refuge that might be their only hope for safety. Eighty years later, that tale crops up when law enforcement ranger Val is determined to keep the peace and honor the wishes of Choctaw Tribal Police when they want justice done for a very cold case. Book banning gets a comic comeuppance with Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books. Beverly is on the school board, crossing swords with her nemesis Lula, who loves the attention when she denounces “filthy” books Lula hasn’t even read. Lula’s front yard contains one of those adorable lending libraries filled with “wholesome” books. But someone–don’t ask me, I don’t know!–yes, someone replaced all her spotless titles with books by Judy Blume and gay romances and black history…and everyone who borrows them absolutely loves them and has their lives changed. It’s a witty celebration of the power of reading, even naughty Judy Blume. The Glassmaker by Tracy Chevalier ($32; Viking) Pre-order now on Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org Shelterwood by Lisa Wingate ($30; Ballantine Books) Pre-order now on Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books by Kirsten Miller ($30; William Morrow) Pre-order now on Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

When The Sea Came Alive book cover images

Courtesy of Avid Reader Press/S&S

17. When The Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day by Garrett M. Graff

World War II will remain a source of endless fascination for centuries, continuing to inspire movies and documentaries and plays and poems and works of fiction and history. And D-Day is the awe-inspiring, climactic moment in which the world held its breath to see if June 6 would finally spell the beginning of the end for the Nazis and fascist Italy. Since more and more war records and documents become available every year, the great works of the past can be built upon. So anyone who read Stephen Ambrose or watched Saving Private Ryan should welcome acclaimed author Garrett M. Graff’s new oral history of that remarkable day. In When The Sea Came Alive, Graff captures the endless drama of that day, sharing the stories and insights of everyone from top generals and world-famous writers right down to the brave men storming Omaha Beach. When The Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day by Garrett M. Graff ($32.49; Avid Reader Press/S&S) Pre-order now on Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

Related: Author Kate DiCamillo on the Book That Changed Her Life and Other Favorites

Swan Song, The Rom-Commers, A Happier Life book cover images

Courtesy of Little, Brown and Company, St. Martin’s Press,Gallery Books

18. Swan Song by Elin Hilderbrand 19. The Rom-Commers by Katherine Center 20. A Happier Life by Kristy Woodson Harvey

Romance is most definitely in the air. Hilderbabe alert! Fans of Elin Hilderbrand’s Nantucket novels surely know that after about 30 novels, she is bringing the series to a close with Swan Song. Hilderbrand insists she is retiring, but maybe a rapturous reception from her legion of readers will convince her that maybe, someday, she’ll return. Meanwhile, Swan Song offers all the drama, lavish parties and heart they’ve come to expect from her. Katherine Center offers another source for the pleasurable charms readers of Hilderbrand will soon be desperately jonesing for. In Center’s latest, an aspiring screenwriter gets a chance to work on a romantic comedy script with the famous Hollywood hero Charlie Yates. But he’s a jerk! And he’s only cranking out this script to get another project greenlit. And he doesn’t believe in love! Oh, it’s on. For her tenth novel, Kristy Woodson Harvey delivers perhaps her most ambitious one yet. Oh it still the small-town warmth and Southern charm you expect. But it also contains two storylines set some 50 years apart. In the 1970s, Becks is struggling to maintain the happy facade of North Carolina’s best hostess with a stunning historic home and perfect life. In the present, Keaton returns to her mother’s empty childhood home to put it up for sale…but discovers a charming nextdoor neighbor, the small town’s enjoyable busybodies and a secret revolving around her grandparents who died tragically so many years ago. Swan Song by Elin Hilderbrand ($30; Little, Brown and Company) Pre-order now on Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org The Rom-Commers by Katherine Center ($29; St. Martin’s Press) Pre-order now on Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org A Happier Life by Kristy Woodson Harvey ($28.99; Gallery Books) Pre-order now on Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

Service Model, Winter Lost, The Cautious Traveler’s Guide to the Wastelands book cover images

Courtesy of Tordotcom, Ace, Flatiron Books

21. Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky 22. Winter Lost by Patricia Briggs 23. The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands By Sarah Brook

Three sci-fi and fantasy books perfect for the beach. Adrian Tchaikovsky knows how to combine humor with a science fiction setting in a way few can. Service Model shows a robot servant murdering their “owner,” realizing they can..run away? Yes, leave! And discover a whole world of possibilities. Don’t tell Siri about this one. Patricia Briggs offers the latest adventure for Mercy Thompson, shapeshifter and car mechanic, mated to a werewolf she loves and struggling to help her brother amidst a storm of immense, perhaps magical proportions. And Sarah Brook has the steampunk debut of the year, a fantasy novel that combines Murder on the Orient Express with a cast of characters on board the Trans-Siberian Express who must trust each other if they are to have any hope of surviving the journey. Across the board acclaim for The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands make this one fans of the genre should jump on. Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky ($28.99; Tordotcom) Pre-order now on Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org Winter Lost by Patricia Briggs ($30; Ace) Pre-order now on Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands by Sarah Brook ($28.99; Flatiron Books) Pre-order now on Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

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Booklist Queen

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The Most Anticipated June 2022 Book Releases

Wondering what to read now? Here are all the hot new June 2022 book releases for you. I’ll let you know what I’ve read, what I can’t wait to read, and what’s getting all the attention this month.

In case you’re new to Booklist Queen, every month I cover all the hottest new book releases. I try to read as many new book releases as I can to give you an honest perspective on what to read and what to skip.

However, I realize that my to-read list might not exactly match yours. That’s why I’ve also included some of the most popular June 2022 book releases from your favorite authors.

Enough from me. Let’s get on to the June 2022 book releases so you can fill up your to-read list.

Don’t Miss a Thing

Top June 2022 Book Releases

How to Raise an Antiracist

Ibram x. kendi.

Ibram X. Kendi, author of the bestseller How to Be an Antiracist , wants to help parents raise the next generation of antiracist thinkers. At first, Kendi didn’t want to talk to his child about racism, fearing it would stain her innocence and steal her joy. However, research shows the opposite. By teaching children the reality of racism and the myth of race, we can build an antiracist society in a diverse world.

Publication Date: 14 June 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

The House Across the Lake

Riley sager.

After a very public breakdown, a recently widowed actress retreats to her family’s Vermont lake house. Casey passes the time spying on her neighbors across the lake: Tom the rich tech innovator and his gorgeous wife Katherine, a former model. When Casey and Katherine become friends, she realizes their marriage isn’t as idyllic as she assumed and becomes even more suspicious when Katherine disappears.

Although I have loved Riley Sager’s previous thrillers, I was severely disappointed with The House Across the Lake . Sager mistimed the suspense in this one, boring you with an over-explanation of the Rear Window concept. Casey’s excessive drinking makes her a very unlikable character, and then, out of nowhere, the “big twist” veers you into the supernatural that you are left perplexed at the bizarre turn of events.

I received a complimentary copy of this book from the Dutton through Netgalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

The Hotel Nantucket

Elin hilderbrand.

After a breakup, Lizbet Keaton is excited for a fresh start at a newly remodeled Gilded Age hotel. Lizbet is desperate to please the billionaire owner and the popular Instagram influencer staying there this summer. With a charismatic staff with hidden pasts and the ghost of a former chambermaid haunting the halls, Lizbet has her work cut out for her as she tries to maintain the hotel’s reputation and sort out her own love life.

James Patterson

Bestselling author James Patterson is among the most-anticipated June 2022 book releases, not for one of his thrillers but for a new memoir detailing his life. Patterson describes how a kid whose dad grew up in a poorhouse became one of the most famous modern storytellers.

Publication Date: 6 June 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Flying Solo

Linda holmes.

After her canceled wedding, Laurie Sassalyn returns to her Maine hometown to settle her great-aunt’s estate. Digging through her aunt’s house, Laurie is surprised to find an old love letter with a strange signoff and a gorgeous carved wooden duck. When the duck disappears under suspicious circumstances, Laurie dives into her great-aunt’s secrets and discovers what it means to make a life for yourself.

Flying Solo is a cute summer romance about discovering yourself in your midlife full of silly hijinx as Laurie fights to get back her aunt’s duck with the help of old friends and a handsome ex-boyfriend. Holmes’s story heavily relies on the concept of an alternate happily ever after, showcasing that marriage is not for everyone.

I received a complimentary copy of this book from the Ballantine Books through Netgalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

Rough Draft

MSNBC news anchor Katy Dur recounts a lifetime of chasing news. Her parents Marika Gerard and Bob (now Zoey) Tur gained fame and wealth as helicopter journalists covering such events as O.J. Simpson’s car chase. By high school, they had lost it all, leaving Tur with a complicated relationship with her parents. Telling of her own rise from local reporter to foreign correspondent and eventually news anchor, Tur ponders on the roles and responsibilities of journalists.

It All Comes Down to This

Therese anne fowler.

Marti Geller has always stated that, after she dies, the family summer cottage will be sold and divided between her three daughters. Beck, a freelance journalist in a loveless marriage, is counting on the inheritance to give her time to write a novel and change her marriage. Recently divorced cardiologist Clare is struggling to fix her complicated love life and Sophie is an Instagram influencer whose empire is sitting on a house of cards. With the death of their mother and the debate over the cottage, the three sisters must come to terms with their own lives.

I love a good family drama, but It All Comes Down to This just didn’t connect with me. I wasn’t interested in any of the sisters’ storylines and the drama felt stale. Even worse, the romantic relationships were a mess, yet then everything tied into too neat of a bow. The whole book felt pointless, and I would suggest passing on this one.

I received a complimentary copy of this book from St. Martin’s Press through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

Save for Later

Book of the Month – June 2022

Receiving my blue box from Book of the Month Club is a highlight of every month.

Here’s how it works – each month, they pick 5 books and you get to choose one book or skip until the next month. If you want to add any extra books, then you get them at a discounted price.

Each month is usually a mix of new releases and advance copies of unreleased books. If you are interested in joining, right now you can use my Book of the Month Club affiliate link to get your first book for $5 !

The June Book of the Month selections are:

book cover The Stardust Thief by Chelsea Abdullah

See the Complete List of Upcoming Releases !

Jenna Bush Hager’s June 2022 Pick

These Impossible Things

Salma el-wardany.

Growing up, Malak, Kees, and Jenna have always struggled to reconcile their own wants with their expectations as Muslim women. Yet, as they age, the balancing act between religion and rebellion becomes harder to manage. Malak wants the dream – the perfect blend of faith and love. Kees has fallen for a white Catholic man whom her family would never accept. Jenna’s years of partying hide a desperate loneliness. As their college years close, one night will change everything and force all three of them in different directions.

Publication Date: 7 June 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Reese’s Book Club June 2022

Counterfeit

Kirstin chen.

Just as strait-laced Ava Wong’s perfect life begins to crumble, her former roommate from mainland China appears with a scheme to make them both rich. Winnie has an audacious scheme to import near replica fakes of expensive luxury goods from China, but she just needs someone with an American passport to pull it off. Yet when the scheme goes south, Winnie disappears, leaving Ava to face the consequences.

Publication Date: 7 June 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Good Morning America’s June 2022 Pick

More Than You’ll Ever Know

Katie gutierrez.

In 1985, Lore Rivera is an international banker, frequently traveling between Texas and Mexico City. Although married to Fabian with twin sons, after Lore has an affair with Andres in Mexico, she secretly marries him as well. When her double life is finally exposed, one husband is arrested for murdering the other. Uncovering this sensational story in the modern-day, a true-crime writer uncovers long-hidden secrets when she tracks down Lore to hear Lore’s side of the story.

Oprah’s Book Club June 2022

Nightcrawling

Leila mottley.

Kiara and her brother Marcus are barely scraping by in Oakland. While Marcus unsuccessfully tries to launch a career as a rap artist, Kiara must support them and an abandoned boy next door with no degree and no resume. When their rent is doubled, Kiara takes up nightcrawling. Working the streets as a prostitute, Kiara becomes ensnared in a massive scandal with the Oakland Police Department.

Patrick Radden Keefe

Bestselling author and journalist Patrick Radden Keefe brings together twelve acclaimed articles from The New Yorker that showcase fascinating stories of underhanded intrigue. From a forger of vintage wines to a whistleblower at a Swiss Bank who is either a hero or a liar, Keefe collects deeply human stories of criminals and rascals and those who stand up to them.

Publication Date: 28 June 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

The Lies I Tell

Julie clark.

Meg. Maggie. Melody. Whatever name she’s using at the moment, she’s a con artist who slides into your life and takes everything when she leaves. Kat Roberts has been waiting ten years to expose the con artist who upended her life. Yet, when the con artist returns, Kat finds matters much more complicated than she realized.

Publication Date: 21 June 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting

Clare pooley.

Every day with her dog, Iona travels the ten train stops from her home to her job as a magazine advice columnist with the same seasoned commuters who never speak to each other. When a man chokes on a grape and is saved by another passenger, the strangers on the train start to get to know each other and find that talking to strangers can change how you see the world.

On Rotation

Shirlene obuobi.

Ghanaian-American Angela Appiah has achieved the pinnacle of success as an immigrant child: medical school, a professional boyfriend, and a loyal group of successful friends. When her boyfriend dumps her, she fails her medical exam, and her best friend stops talking to her, Angela begins to question if this life is what she wants or what her parents have chosen for her.

Geraldine Brooks

In 1850, an enslaved groom leads a thoroughbred horse to a series of stunning victories. When the Civil War breaks out, a young artist fighting for the Union encounters the groom and his horse under dangerous circumstances. In 1954, a gallery owner becomes obsessed with a mysterious 19th century equestrian painting and, in 2019, a scientist and an art historian are brought together to uncover the secrets of the horse and its groom.

The Woman in the Library

Sulari gentill.

In the ornate reading room at the Boston Public Library, a woman’s scream shatters the usual quiet. Immediately, security guards descend, instructing everyone to stay put until the all-clear is given. Four strangers sitting a the same table are trapped together, each with their own reasons for being in the library, one of whom is a murderer.

How Are You, Really?

Jenna kutcher.

Forget hustle harder and work smarter. What women really want are lives of fulfillment. Jenna Kutcher, the host of the popular Goal Digger podcast, teaches that instead of trying to have it all, you should be striving for a work/life balance that lets you actually enjoy your life. Kutcher wants you to understand who you are, help you build a support system that will enable you to build a life full of success, joy, and time to enjoy it.

Get What You Want

Julie solomon.

Julie Solomon, a business coach and creator of The Influencer Podcast , wants to empower women to make the impossible happen in their lives. Learn how to overcome your origin stories and throw away self-doubt to find the confidence you need to find your true purpose and push your goals further.

Although I love to read business books for women, I was not impressed with Get What You Want . Solomon worked so hard to only include original material that she missed out on showcasing her strengths to the reader. The first half of the book heavily focuses on mindset, yet Solomon doesn’t give specific examples or interesting anecdotes, so the advice goes in one ear and out the other. Near the end, she finally hints at concrete business advice about pitching that make me think her courses are worth purchasing, but sadly I don’t think the book is.

I received a complimentary copy of this book from the author. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

Popular June Upcoming Releases

book cover A Botanist's Guide to Parties and Poisons by Kate Khavari

What June 2022 Book Releases are You Most Excited to Read?

What books can you not wait to get your hands on this month? Did I miss any June 2022 book releases that you are anticipating? As always, let me know in the comments!

More New Book Releases:

Can’t Miss May 2022 Book Releases
The Hottest July 2022 Book Releases
Book of the Month June 2022 Selections
The Best Books of 2022
The Best New Thrillers Books

Recommended

Reader Interactions

June 1, 2022 at 11:09 am

Vacationland, Woman of Light & Horse!

My May reading was pretty slow, despite all my best intentions.

So hopefully I can pick up the pace.

June 3, 2022 at 5:26 pm

Update: I was able to jump on library wait lists for the books I previously listed.

I think the first book started in May, but finished in June for me was Lessons In Chemistry. Not sure why, but that was a stop & start & almost DNF for me, but in the end I liked it well enough.

I am currently reading Jennifer Weiner’s The Summer Place. Liking it so far. This will be my second Weiner book. The first was Big Summer. Easy & enjoyable reads.

I picked up some great titles at the library today; 3 of which I was on wait lists for:

Truly Madly: Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier and the romance of the century.

The Netanyahus: An account of a minor and untimely even negligible episode in the history of a very famous family

Bomb Shelter Love, Time And Other Explosives

How about those titles!!!! I need to get to Bomb Shelter fast, bc I know I will not be allowed to recheck it.

Also got Tides by Sara Freeman, a debut I was unfamiliar with, but looks good.

Side note: The above book & also Heaven (International Booker prize nominee) by Mieko Kawakami would make great travel books or books to take to someone you are traveling to visit. Both are nice and compact!!

Happy June everyone!! I have a dreaded but necessary surgery coming up, so I have my reading material all lined up.

5 satisfying books to read this June

Tomi Adeyemi concludes her series, Questlove does hip-hop history and an experimental novel bends the rules

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Book covers of 'The Future Was Color' by Patrick Nathan, 'Parade' by Rachel Cusk, and 'Hip-Hop Is History' by Questlove

Summer reading may not be required for adults, but books go hand in hand with beachy weather and bright skies. These June book releases are primed to accompany you outside and include the final chapter of Tomi Adeyemi's "Legacy of the Orisha" series, a hip-hop history book and an experimental novel from Rachel Cusk.

'The Future Was Color' by Patrick Nathan (June 4)

Patrick Nathan's latest novel has all the earmarks of a good beach read. "The Future Was Color" starts as the story of a "semi-closeted gay screenwriter in 1950s Hollywood," but the "scope grows to encompass issues of identity, social mores and the survival of humankind," said Kirkus Reviews . George, a Hungarian immigrant working as a screenwriter in 1956 Hollywood, finds himself taking refuge in the home of a predatory pair of married actors as he tries to write about politics in a post-war era. Nathan's novel is an "immaculately written exploration of postwar American decadence, reinventing the self through art and the psychosis that lingers in a world that's seen the bomb" said the Los Angeles Review of Books . Order here .

'Tehrangeles' by Porochista Khakpour (June 11)

If you are the type who loves "talking to your smartest friends about the Bravoverse," then Porochista Khakpour's "Tehrangeles" is the "summer novel for you," said Jessie Gaynor on Lit Hub . The Milanis, a wealthy Iranian family in Los Angeles, have just landed a reality TV deal that could turn them into stars. But it is late 2019, and the world is about to be turned upside down by Covid-19. The novel is loosely like "Little Women" meets " Shahs of Sunset ," with a "cast of pitch-perfect characters who I found exasperating, heart-rending and endlessly compelling," Gaynor said. "Tehrangeles" is a pandemic novel but "not in the way you and I experienced it," Khakpour said on her Substack . "It is about pandemic madness and people who cannot help but do the exact wrong thing often." Pre-order here .

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'Hip-Hop Is History' by Questlove (June 11)

In the "spiritual sequel" to his 2021 book, " Music Is History ," the musician and Oscar-winning director traces the first 50 years of hip-hop through "insightful and passionate analysis" that celebrates the "big-named artists who popularized the style," as well as "lesser-known creatives who quietly influenced rap's rise," said Time . Questlove pairs the history of hip-hop with a personal reflection on how the genre shaped his identity during his childhood in Philadelphia. "A must-read for old-school hip-hop heads and burgeoning fans alike," Time said. Pre-order here.

'Parade' by Rachel Cusk (June 18)

Rachel Cusk, author of the Outline trilogy, is known for her experimental style. She is back with her latest novel, Parade, which tells the story of an artist, G, who takes on the personas of "many different people, leading different lives, encountering different experiences and sensations," said Lit Hub's Dwyer Murphy. The book bounces back and forth between an omniscient narrator and a first-person perspective. Like her most recent book, 2021's "The Second Place," the novel has a "penetrating interrogation of what it means to experience the world through, with and alongside artists," said Murphy. Cusk is a "kind of magician," leaving readers "wondering how it was done, how this sense of wonder was elicited so beautifully." Pre-order here .

'Children of Anguish and Anarchy' by Tomi Adeyemi (June 25)

Tomi Adeyemi's West African-inspired New York Times bestselling "Legacy of Orïsha" series is finally coming to a close with the third and final book, "Children of Anguish and Anarchy." The first book in the series " Children of Blood and Bone " made a huge splash when it was released in 2018, with Adeyemi's work being compared to some of the best young adult series. With a film adaptation to come, now is the perfect time to catch up on the series ahead of the finale. It has been five years since her last book, so this is one of the year's most anticipated releases. Pre-order here .

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Theara Coleman has worked as a staff writer at The Week since September 2022. She frequently writes about technology, education, literature and general news. She was previously a contributing writer and assistant editor at Honeysuckle Magazine, where she covered racial politics and cannabis industry news.

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How America Turned Stories Into Weapons of War

In a new book, the journalist and science fiction writer Annalee Newitz shows how we have used narrative to manipulate and coerce.

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This is a cover of a comic book called Sensation Comics. The comic’s title is in bold blue letters on a stripe of red over a yellow circle in which we see an image of Wonder Woman in her iconic tiara and strapless dress. She uses her wristbands to block bullets fired by three tough-looking armed men on the ground below her.

By Jennifer Szalai

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STORIES ARE WEAPONS: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind , by Annalee Newitz

A story can entertain and inform; it can also deceive and manipulate. Perhaps few stories are as seductive as the ones we tell ourselves about ourselves — those reasonable, principled creatures so many of us presume ourselves to be.

As Annalee Newitz writes in “Stories Are Weapons,” propaganda is premised on exploiting the discrepancy between surface beliefs and unconscious motives. A clever propagandist can get any number of people who see themselves as invariably kindhearted to betray their ideals. Newitz gives the example of anti-immigration campaigns: Make humans so fearful that even pious, churchgoing grandmothers will countenance rounding up their fellow humans in detention camps.

Not that Newitz, a journalist and science fiction author who uses they/them pronouns, depicts all propaganda as necessarily evil. “Stories Are Weapons,” an exploration of our culture wars’ roots in psychological warfare, contains a chapter on comic book artists like William Moulton Marston, the psychologist and creator of Wonder Woman, who “wanted to empower women” and believed that “propaganda was a progressive force.” But much of the book is about stories that have been used to undermine, to exclude and to wound: myths about the frontier and the “last Indian”; pseudo-intellectual treatises expounding junk-science racism; conspiracy theories about “pizza-eating pedophiles”; and moral panics about rainbow stickers.

And then there are the stories that sow confusion. Newitz explains that they began researching this book in the middle of 2020, while the pandemic was raging and the president was promoting the healing powers of sunlight and bleach . The gutting of reproductive rights and the introduction of anti-trans bills, Newitz says, made them feel as if they were under siege.

“For anyone who has been told that they should not be alive,” Newitz writes on the dedication page. “Together we will survive this war.” Stories are weapons — but Newitz argues that they can also open up pathways to peace. “As a fiction writer, I knew there were other ways to get at the truth, to make sense of a world gripped by absurdity and chaos. I had to tell a story.”

That story is introduced through the exploits of two central figures. The first is Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, a pioneer in the field that became known as “public relations.” To sell Lucky Strike cigarettes to women, Bernays devised a publicity campaign that linked the product to women’s desires for freedom. “Bernays had successfully turned his uncle’s project to promote mental health into a system for manipulating people into behaving irrationally,” Newitz writes, recounting how he later worked with the C.I.A. to drum up antipathy toward Guatemala’s democratically elected government. A prime beneficiary of the eventual coup was Bernays’s client, United Fruit, which owned huge swaths of Guatemalan land.

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A Camera Light as a Pen. A film series and two recent books expand the canon of the French New Wave. Forgotten Filmmakers of the French New Wave. a film series at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, May 4-June 5, 2022; and the Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 6-June 19, 2022. The Legacy of the New Wave in French Cinema.
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THE LONG CORNER, by Alexander Maksik. (Europa, $27.) A writer who has traded his literary aspirations for the flat language of commerce narrates Maksik's fourth novel, set in a New York reeling ...
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Published May 12, 2022 Updated June 29, 2022. ... (New York Review Books, $29.95.) Paul's haunting memoir takes the form of correspondence with a fellow painter she never knew: Gwen John, who ...
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September 21, 2022 ... the Dalit politician B.R. Ambedkar's fight against caste inequality acquires a new significance. June 20, 2024 issue ... Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest. Or, see all newsletter options here. Email Address.
Table of Contents
June 22, 2023. June 22, 2023. Fara Dabhoiwala. Life Is Short. Indexes Are Necessary. ... David Shrigley: Old Cat, 2022 (© 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London) Series art Romy Blümel: Pebble, 2023. ... Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest. Or, see all newsletter options here. Email ...
The Best Books of 2022
The Book of Goose. by Yiyun Li (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Fiction. This novel dissects the intense friendship between two thirteen-year-olds, Agnès and Fabienne, in postwar rural France. Believing ...
Issue June 9, 2022
The New York Review of Books June 9, 2022. Add to favorites. For over 50 years, The New York Review of Books has been the place where the world's leading authors, scientists, educators, artists, and political leaders turn when they wish to engage in a spirited debate on literature, politics, art, and ideas with a small but influential audience ...
Book Review
Reviews, essays, best sellers and children's books coverage from The New York Times Book Review. ... Best-Seller Lists: June 16, 2024. All the lists: print, e-books, fiction, nonfiction, children ...
Recent issues of The New York Review of Books
November 24, 2022. The New York Review of Books. November 3, 2022. The New York Review of Books. October 20, 2022. The New York Review of Books. October 6, 2022. The New York Review of Books. September 22, 2022.
The New York Times Book Review: Back Issues
Complete contents of the Book Review since 1997. ... The New York Times Book Review: Back Issues. ... June 5, 2022. May 29, 2022. May 22, 2022. May 15, 2022.
The Best Books of 2022
Stay True: A Memoir, by Hua Hsu. In this quietly wrenching memoir, Hsu recalls starting out at Berkeley in the mid-1990s as a watchful music snob, fastidiously curating his tastes and mercilessly ...
The New York Review Of Books
The New York Review of Books (June 9, 2024) - The latest issue features: Livelier Than the Living In the Renaissance, reading became both a passion and a pose of detachment—for those who could afford it—from the pursuits of wealth and power. A Marvelous Solitude: The Art of Reading in Early Modern Europe by Lina….
The 10 Best Books of 2022: An Event Announcing Our List
By The New York Times Published Nov. 22, 2022 Updated Nov. 29, 2022 Each year, the editors of The New York Times Book Review publish their highly anticipated 10 Best Books of the year .
The best new books of June 2022
By. Leah Greenblatt. Published on June 22, 2022 06:07PM EDT. Our picks for the best new books of June 2022 include Sloane Crosley's 'Cult Classic' and Kirstin Chen's 'Counterfeit' . Photo ...
Book Review: 'The Friday Afternoon Club,' by Griffin Dunne
In his memoir "The Friday Afternoon Club," the Hollywood hyphenate Griffin Dunne, best known for his role in Martin Scorsese's "After Hours," recounts his privileged upbringing.
17 New Books Coming in June
Cue the Sun !, by Emily Nussbaum. From "Queen for a Day" to "The Real World," "Survivor" and "The Apprentice," it's all here in the New Yorker staff writer's capacious look at ...
What We're Reading This Summer
New Yorker writers recommend books featuring a nineteenth-century love triangle, trans zombie hunters, revelry with the Rolling Stones, and more. By The New Yorker July 4, 2022
34 Most Anticipated New June 2022 Book Releases by Genre
Most Anticipated June 2022 Fiction Book Releases. Gilt by Jamie Brenner. Out of the Clear Blue Sky by Kristan Higgins. Counterfeit by Kristin Chen. The Messy Lives of Book People by Phaedra Patrick. The Beach Trap by Ali Brady. Love & Other Great Expectations by Becky Dean. The Hotel Nantucket by Elin Hilderbrand.
The 23 Best New Books of June 2024
The 23 Best New Books of June 2024. Courtesy of Little, Brown and Company. 1. Eruption by Michael Crichton and James Patterson. Blockbuster author Michael Crichton died in 2008, leaving behind a ...
The Most Anticipated June 2022 Book Releases
James Patterson. James Patterson. Bestselling author James Patterson is among the most-anticipated June 2022 book releases, not for one of his thrillers but for a new memoir detailing his life. Patterson describes how a kid whose dad grew up in a poorhouse became one of the most famous modern storytellers. Publication Date: 6 June 2022.
7 New Books We Recommend This Week
June 6, 2024. This week we take our cue from the title of Stephen King's new story collection, "You Like It Darker," with books about a honeymoon gone wrong, an artist's midlife crisis and ...
5 books to read in June 2024
5 satisfying books to read this June. Tomi Adeyemi concludes her series, Questlove does hip-hop history and an experimental novel bends the rules. Dive deep into these breezy summer reads. (Image ...
Book Review: 'Stories Are Weapons,' by Annalee Newitz
In a new book, the journalist and science fiction writer Annalee Newitz shows how we have used narrative to manipulate and coerce. One of Wonder Woman's earliest appearances in a comic book, in ...