The Best Books We Read This Week

• 
  Cold Kitchen

  by Caroline Eden (Bloomsbury)

  Nonfiction

  Primarily unfolding in the kitchen of an Edinburgh apartment, this cozy memoir offers rich descriptions of international foods stored in the pantry and cooking on the stove. But “a kitchen is a portal,” Eden writes. These domestic scenes spark recollections of visits to Central Asia—Istanbul, Riga, Siberia—and each chapter closes with a recipe for a now familiar dish. In the book’s strongest moments, Eden gestures toward the political significance of her culinary escapades abroad. At a café in Poland, she reflects on the legacy of the Second World War; in Kyrgyzstan, she ventures out for clover dumplings in the aftermath of protests there. In so doing, she asserts that food can be as valuable as a place’s “history, architecture and civic life.”

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• 
  Love and Need

  by Adam Plunkett (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  Blending biography and criticism, Plunkett shows how the circumstances of Frost’s peripatetic life gave rise to some of his most successful poems. As in the best critical biographies, Plunkett does not merely track down real-world inspiration for a given work. Rather, he brings together Frost’s personal life, literary sources, and publication history to enrich our understanding of the poems, then uses the poems to enhance our understanding of the life. The result is a thorough, elegant, and, at times, surprising study of Frost, who emerges as a remarkably complex poet and a compelling but complicated man.

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  Read more: “The Many Guises of Robert Frost,” by Maggie Doherty
• 
  Code Noir

  by Canisia Lubrin (Soft Skull)

  Fiction

  This collection of “fictions”—many too strange to be called stories—is filled with disappearances, deaths, and gnomic pronouncements. Lubrin, a St. Lucian-born Canadian poet, writes that “the murderers in this draft are those who write the laws,” referring to the titular seventeenth-century French edict that governed the traffic and ownership of Black people. Text from these regulations appears between Lubrin’s pieces, hauntingly drawn over by the artist Torkwase Dyson. The collection displays tremendous stylistic breadth: one work simply describes seventeen dogs, another features a mathematically gifted conch shell, and others are closer to poetry, with only a few plotless lines. The over-all effect is a dizzying, disorienting view of “history’s wide grave.

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Books & Fiction



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• 
  Victorian Psycho

  by Virginia Feito (Liveright)

  Fiction

  Winifred, the protagonist of this Victorian-era grotesque, takes a position as a governess at an English manor. The lady of the house, Mrs. Pounds, has instructed her to cultivate “good moral character” in her children, but Winifred senses “a Darkness” in Mrs. Pounds, one that she herself shares: it “rests within my rib-cage, a jailed animal grown listless with domestication.” Vandalism and lechery are among the milder affronts that occur on Winifred’s watch, and her narration, though sombre, sparkles. “It fascinates me,” Winifred reflects, “that humans have the capacity to mortally wound one another at will, but for the most part, choose not to.”

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Last Week’s Picks

• 
  From Our Pages

  Lorne

  by Susan Morrison (Random House)

  Nonfiction

  The New Yorker’s articles editor spent a decade on this sly, anecdote-stuffed biography of Lorne Michaels, the producer who created “S.N.L.” Her witty and insightful portrait incorporates hundreds of interviews, including writers and comedians—such as Tina Fey, Bill Murray, and Will Ferrell—who got their start on the show. An excerpt appeared in the magazine.

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Previous Picks

• 
  Land Power

  by Michael Albertus (Basic)

  Nonfiction

  In the past few centuries, land has changed hands on major scales: from nobles to commoners during the French Revolution, from Native peoples to European settlers in North America, and from the wealthy to the poor in China, Russia, and Mexico. This sweeping study examines the results of such shifts, which, the author argues, are what set countries on diverging developmental paths and produced a host of modern social ills. The seizure of land by settlers, for instance, entrenched racism, and collectivization under Communist regimes led to environmental destruction. But Albertus is optimistic. Better policies, he insists, show the power of land as “a tool for forging a more just and sustainable world.”

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• 
  Helen of Troy, 1993

  by Maria Zoccola (Scribner)

  Poetry

  This exuberant début poetry collection recasts the titular heroine as an Appalachian housewife reckoning with the tyrannies of beauty, domesticity, and small-town gossip during the late twentieth century. Zoccola’s Helen is neither femme fatale nor damsel in distress; here, the “face that launched a thousand ships” belies a person with a teeming, tenacious mind and implacable appetites. She catalogues her pregnancy cravings—“corn chips. sliced watermelon. microwave pizza rolls”—and pursues an affair. Defiant, Helen sings of her rage against “a life of small mercies and small choices,” illuminating the perennial struggle between a unique yet universal woman and the world that would confine her.

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• 
  After Lives

  by Megan Marshall (Mariner)

  Nonfiction

  In this slim volume of essays, Marshall, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, turns inward, reflecting on her discovery of old personal paraphernalia, including letters and photographs. She writes of her grandfather, Joe Marshall, who oversaw photography and film for the American Expeditionary Forces during the First World War, and of Jonathan Jackson, a Black high-school classmate, who was killed at seventeen when he tried to free his older brother, a Black Power activist, from prison. The book also contains anecdotes about the death of her partner and revelations about her mother, a gifted painter who sacrificed her art in order to help raise her family.

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• 
  The Riveter

  by Jack Wang (HarperVia)

  Fiction

  Set in Canada, the U.S., and Europe during the Second World War, this historical novel explores the life of a Chinese Canadian man, Josiah Chang, whose romance with a white woman, Poppy, undergirds his drive to prove himself. Tracing Josiah’s trajectory from lumberjack to shipyard riveter to ambitious serviceman, Wang offers a protagonist of unflappable morality and decency. Despite racially discriminatory laws barring him from enlisting (and gaining citizenship), Josiah nonetheless joins an élite parachuting battalion and intervenes to prevent war crimes. Nodding toward this Odyssean journey, Wang’s novel presents a familiar tale of war and homecoming, rife with correspondence, death, and pangs of yearning for a beloved back home.

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• 
  The Secret History of the Rape Kit

  by Pagan Kennedy (Vintage)

  Nonfiction

  In the Chicago metro area of the nineteen-seventies, about two thousand rapes were reported to the police every year—and, unsurprisingly, many thousands more went unreported. A nonprofit executive named Marty Goddard came up with an idea for a forensic kit that could be used in all rape exams. Soon, Chicago became “the first city to widely adopt a standardized sexual-assault forensic kit,” Kennedy writes. DNA evidence in rape kits has exonerated the innocent—including many Black men who were falsely accused of assaulting white women—and cracked decades-old cold cases, among them that of Joseph DeAngelo, known as the Golden State Killer. But, as Kennedy makes painfully clear, the rape kit has also become a paradoxical symbol of systemic indifference toward rape and its victims. Every few years, a scandalous news report emerges about one municipality or another that either hoarded or destroyed unprocessed kits. Despite efforts to clear the backlog, hundreds of thousands of kits sit untested nationwide, and ten states still have no tracking system for them.

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  Read more: “The Frustrated Promise of the Rape Kit,” by Jessica Winter
• 
  Shattered

  by Hanif Kureishi (Ecco)

  Nonfiction

  On Boxing Day, 2022, Kureishi, a novelist and screenwriter, experienced an accident that left him tetraplegic. The diary entries that constitute this book, dictated from hospital beds in Rome and London, offer an unflinching look at Kureishi’s affliction. Interspersed throughout are recollections of his boyhood and his family: he reminisces about his father—a civil servant from Bombay who named his son after a cricket player—and broods about his mother. Amid the monotony of hospital routines and physiotherapy sessions, writing becomes Kureishi’s anchor: “I am determined to keep writing, it has never mattered to me more.”

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• 
  The Dissenters

  by Youssef Rakha (Graywolf)

  Fiction

  This novel, the first written in English by one of Egypt’s leading authors, takes the form of letters from a man in Cairo to his sister, who lives in America. In the letters, the man interweaves their mother’s story—involving a failed first marriage, female genital mutilation, an affair, and transformations from secularism to religiosity and back again—with reflections on his own life, his experience of her recent death, and the wider history of his country. Designating himself “a truth-seeker, a lover, a revolutionary,” the man notes that he “could never be any of those things if I didn’t understand that I was an Egyptian woman’s son.”

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• 
  New and Collected Hell

  by Shane McCrae (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Poetry

  In an allusion to Dante and his Inferno, this book-length poem follows a poet on his journey through an underworld that has been audaciously recast in a post-millennial context and vernacular. McCrae’s Hell contains a human-resources “bunker,” conducts intake interviews, shows the damned on screens that hang above gray cubicles sprawling endlessly in all directions, and communicates by fax machine only. The narrator’s guide says “It’s mostly assholes who think Hell’s where justice happens Hell / Is sorrow’s Heaven where it goes to live forever with / Its god the human body.” Unlike Dante’s narrator, McCrae’s neo-Virgil never gains any real clarity. The poem’s meticulous inventory of one person’s anguish stands alongside the equally emphatic impossibility of capturing the whole.

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  Read more: “The Poet Shane McCrae Goes Back to Hell,” by Elisa Gonzalez
• 
  In Defense of Partisanship

  by Julian E. Zelizer (Columbia Global Reports)

  Nonfiction

  In this concise treatise, Zelizer argues that the solution to the dysfunction in American politics lies not in third-partyism, bipartisanship, or a strengthened executive branch but, rather, in an improved two-party system. He lays out the case for why such a system still represents “the best way to organize and direct the deep tensions that always exist within the electorate.” Tracing the Democratic and the Republican Parties from their births through the congressional reforms of the nineteen-seventies (which ushered in the era of intense partisanship we know today), Zelizer dissects what has gone wrong and provides a clear and accessible blueprint for further changes—including ending the filibuster and eliminating the debt ceiling.

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• 
  Somewhere Toward Freedom

  by Bennett Parten (Simon & Schuster)

  Nonfiction

  In the fall of 1864, General William Sherman took sixty thousand Union soldiers some two hundred and fifty miles from Atlanta to the ocean, scorching a vast swath of the state along the way. The campaign is remembered as a path of destruction, a total war waged against the white civilians of the South. Yet to the many enslaved people across the state who left their homes and followed Sherman to the sea, the march meant freedom. This is the central narrative of Parten’s new book, “Somewhere Toward Freedom.” Parts of this story have been told before, in broader works about the Civil War or emancipation or the march itself. But Parten’s may be the first to make freedpeople its sole focus, and to claim that they were essential to the march’s meaning.

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  Read more: “The Other Side of Sherman’s March,” by Scott Spillman
• 
  Blob

  by Maggie Su (Harper)

  Fiction

  In this slyly self-aware and gently comic novel, a twenty-four-year-old college dropout, Vi, who is stuck in a dead-end job and getting over a bad breakup, discovers a blob on the ground outside a dive bar. She takes the blob—which to her recalls “the slime I made as a kid”—back to her apartment and shapes it, golem-like, into her ideal boyfriend, whom she names Bob. Vi is chubby, socially awkward, and uneasy with her own “otherness” (she is the child of an Asian father and a white mother), and she seeks conventional perfection in Bob, who develops washboard abs and movie-star looks. But problems arise when Bob starts to feel desires of his own—a turn that both accelerates the novel’s sharp plot and enriches its examination of the complex relationship between longing and identity.

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• 
  Everything Must Go

  by Dorian Lynskey (Pantheon)

  Nonfiction

  Lynskey, a British journalist and podcaster, has assembled a host of biological, geological, archeological, literary, and cinematic permutations of apocalyptic finales, leaving no stone unturned. Popular culture complements literary culture; Lynskey fearlessly juxtaposes Skeeter Davis’s song “The End of the World” (about heartbreak) with Mary Shelley’s “The Last Man.” This multilayered narrative pays respects to Saul Bellow, Norman Cohn, Richard Hofstadter, and Susan Sontag. A recap of the Y2K scare, which now seems quaintly innocent, reminds us of simpler tech times; Lynskey also dwells briefly on the possibility of malicious rogue A.I. The author allots space to all sorts of apocalypses—sudden infertility, rising seas, nuclear war—but, for the most part, “Everything Must Go” relishes the opportunity to ruminate on our apocalyptic obsessions: doom without the gloom.

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  Read more: “What We Learn About Our World by Imagining Its End,” by Arthur Krystal
• 
  Black in Blues

  by Imani Perry (Ecco)

  Nonfiction

  This cultural history of the color blue, and how it threads through Black lives and “the peculiar institution of slavery,” opens with the indigo trade in the sixteenth century. The dye’s production by enslaved individuals was, Perry writes, “an early and clear example of a global desire to harness blue beauty into personal possession.” Touching on a range of historical, artistic, musical, and literary references—from the color’s significance in Yoruba cosmology to the blue candles used in hoodoo rituals to the “tremor” of the “blue note”—Perry illuminates how the color has been variously associated with mourning, spiritual strength, and forces of freedom and oppression.

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• 
  Make Your Own Job

  by Erik Baker (Harvard)

  Nonfiction

  Mantras like “do what you love,” “bring your whole self to work,” and “make a life, not just a living” can seem like a distinctly modern phenomenon, but Baker, a lecturer in the history of science at Harvard, argues that the imperative to imbue work with personal meaning is part of a long-standing national preoccupation. His new book, an exercise in intellectual history, is concerned less with the chronological development of American entrepreneurship than with the idea of it. Baker aims to track the anxieties and desires of a society undergoing epochal transitions and the promulgation of what he calls “the entrepreneurial work ethic”: an orientation that is highly individualistic and competitive.

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  Read more: “The Insidious Charms of the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic,” by Anna Wiener
• 
  My Darling Boy

  by John Dufresne (Norton)

  Fiction

  In this novel, a sensitive portrait of parenthood, a divorced, retired newspaperman named Olney, now working part time at a miniature-golf course in Florida, embarks on a quest to save his son from opioid addiction. Along the way, he encounters a host of Florida-gothic figures, both comic and tragic, including a reverend with a cable-access show and blind octogenarian twins. His relationships with these peculiar characters contribute to the novel’s emotional power, even as the devoted Olney finds little respite or reason for hope: “He thinks of all the people who have come and gone in his life, and how once they start going, they don’t stop.”

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• 
  From Our Pages

  The Vanishing Point

  by Paul Theroux (Mariner)

  Fiction

  The eighteen stories in this new collection look toward the “vanishing point”: in some cases, the end of life; in others, a different kind of ending. “I know exactly what is coming for me,” one character says. “This is not clairvoyance. It is the bleak certainty of a private promise.” In the stories, which jump from continent to continent, a man realizes, to his dismay, that his anger can be mysteriously weaponized; another comes up with a twisted way to resist his wife’s plan to move to assisted living; a boy in Massachusetts weighs the pleasure of transgression against the state of his immortal soul. All the narratives look at life at an angle, shining unfamiliar light on both its sweet and its bitter offerings. Two of the stories, including the title story, were first published in the magazine.

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• 
  American Laughter, American Fury

  by Eran A. Zelnik (Hopkins)

  Nonfiction

  This sobering history tracks how humor, with “its double-edged nature,” was deployed on this side of the Atlantic between 1750 and 1850 to tear down old hierarchies and build up new ones, in the process helping the young United States become a democracy reserved for the benefit of white men. With examples including rebellious colonists’ proud adoption of “Yankee Doodle” as their anthem—the song was initially sung by British troops, to make fun of supposedly unsophisticated locals—and the emergence of blackface minstrelsy, Zelnik shows how white settlers used playfulness and humor to position themselves as the rightful owners of the land, to the exclusion not only of foppish Brits but also of Indigenous and Black Americans.

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• 
  Open Socrates

  by Agnes Callard (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  We often imagine the Socratic method as a kind of heightened Q. & A.: professors peppering their students with queries, fervent debates in which we poke holes in one another’s arguments. In fact, Callard argues, the philosopher’s intervention was more radical: he inaugurated a whole way of life. It involves the uncomfortable, even painful, process of questioning the basic ideas through which you’ve organized your existence. Crucially, this is a social process. “The standard approach to thinking privileges what is private and unvoiced,” Callard writes. Socratic thinking inverts this picture. Thinking, Callard suggests, happens when two people who see themselves as equals pursue a question together.

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  Read more: “Should You Question Everything?,” by Joshua Rothman
• 
  Too Soon

  by Betty Shamieh (Avid Reader)

  Fiction

  This début comic novel, by an accomplished playwright, stitches together the lives of three generations of Palestinian women as they search for personal freedom. Spanning six decades and told from alternating points of view, the story follows Zoya, who flees a besieged Jaffa for the U.S. in the nineteen-forties; her daughter, Naya, and her experience as the child of refugees in the seventies; and Naya’s irreverent daughter Arabella, who, in Palestine in the twenty-tens, endeavors to direct a gender-reversed production of “Hamlet.” As Shamieh balances her characters’ painful family history and their boisterously funny voices, the women navigate between the “push to be modern, radical, and free” and the “pull to find comfort in a community and identity” born of tradition.

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• 
  Gliff

  by Ali Smith (Penguin)

  Fiction

  Smith’s playful new dystopia follows two children as they navigate a heavily surveilled world in which tech is omnipresent, and oppressive. People who fall out of the system—people who, for instance, cannot authenticate themselves on their device, or, perhaps, don’t own a device—are deemed “unverifiable.” One day, the children wake up to find that a red circle has been painted around their house. When they move to a new location, it happens again: another red circle. It’s a warning sign that puts them at risk of being sent off to a brutal “re-education” center. Suddenly, they’re on the run. Part of the joy of “Gliff” is that, while it is set in a dark future, there are moments of genuine humor. The questions the siblings must answer while travelling are specific to the point of absurdity: what brand of toothpaste they use, and why, and whether they are a dog or cat person. At one point, one of the children says, “Yeah but a passport doesn’t prove we’re us. . . . We prove a passport’s it. We just are us.”

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  Read more: “Ali Smith’s Playful Dystopia,” by Anna Russell

• 
  American Oasis

  by Kyle Paoletta (Pantheon)

  Nonfiction

  For many Americans, the cities of the Southwest are beautiful but slightly terrifying vacation destinations. In this elegant book, Paoletta, who is from New Mexico, argues that these desert cities’ histories of survival make them ideal models for other American metropolises. Through a series of sensitive portraits of the region’s biggest cities—including Albuquerque, Phoenix, El Paso, and Las Vegas—Paoletta demonstrates how Southwesterners’ centuries of experience with extreme heat, water scarcity, and “stitching a complex social fabric” from groups of Native Americans, Hispanics, Anglos, and immigrants can impart lessons for other cities facing similar challenges.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  We Do Not Part

  by Han Kang, translated from the Korean by e. yaewonPaige Morris (Hogarth)

  Fiction

  In the latest work from the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, a woman, Kyungha, must travel from Seoul to Jeju Island before the end of the day, in order to keep her friend’s pet bird from dying of thirst; during the journey, she navigates the perils of an increasingly ferocious blizzard and contemplates the different ways that people endure pain, as well as the ways that they make life bearable and forge on. The novel was excerpted in the magazine.

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• 
  Before Elvis

  by Preston Lauterbach (Grand Central)

  Nonfiction

  This book considers the influence on Elvis Presley of Black musicians, especially the gospel and R. & B. pioneers of the nineteen-forties and early nineteen-fifties. Drawing from both existing scholarship and firsthand reporting, Lauterbach highlights the artists who originated the songs and invented the techniques with which Presley captivated white audiences, such as Big Mama Thornton—the first singer of “Hound Dog”—and the jazz guitarist Calvin Newborn. The book also chronicles the injustices Black musical pioneers endured, including withheld copyright credits and royalties, and the racism of machine politicians like Memphis’s E. H. (Boss) Crump and the censor he hired, who was determined to ban any material that showed Black people in a positive light.

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• 
  The Sirens’ Call

  by Chris Hayes (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  In the past fifteen years, an avalanche of literature has been published about how technology has ruined our attention spans. Hayes’s new book is perhaps the most sophisticated contribution to the genre. He openly acknowledges that technology panics—induced by everything from comic books to television—have a long history, but he argues that we are living in unprecedented times. Drawing on his own experience as an anchor at MSNBC, where he has observed thoughtful journalists debase themselves in their scramble to retain straying viewers, Hayes makes the case that “focus is harder and harder to sustain.” For this, he blames digital tools that capitalize on our psychological hardwiring; some things we pay attention to by choice, and others we simply find hard to ignore. “Our dominion over our own minds has been punctured,” Hayes writes. “The scale of transformation we’re experiencing is far more vast and more intimate than even the most panicked critics have understood.” And the painful twist is that the thing we really ought to focus on, climate change, “evades our attentional facilities.”

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  Read more: “What if the Attention Crisis Is All a Distraction?,” by Daniel Immerwahr
• 
  Going Home

  by Tom Lamont (Knopf)

  Fiction

  At the start of this brilliantly observed début novel, Téo, a traffic-laws instructor, is babysitting the two-year-old son of his childhood friend (and lifelong crush) Lia—not knowing that Lia, a single mother, will use the time to kill herself. When social workers dispatched after the incident deem the rules-abiding Téo to be one of the child’s “better bets,” he is tasked with serving as the boy’s caregiver until a permanent guardian can be found. A trio of unhelpful but well-meaning figures support him: his ailing father, their temple’s unpopular new rabbi, and a hedonistic friend. While teasing the reader with questions about the child’s paternity, Lamont’s story of a make-do family revels in the often comically porous borders of faith, home, and adulthood.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant

  by Mavis Gallant, edited by Garth Risk Hallberg (New York Review Books)

  Fiction

  This volume includes forty-four previously uncollected stories by Gallant—a master of the form, who published more than a hundred stories in The New Yorker. Painstakingly tracked down and assembled by Garth Risk Hallberg, the stories span Gallant’s writing life from 1944, when she was twenty-two, to 1987, and are full of her pointed wit, her acute observations, and her profound understanding of the desire, terror, and loneliness that drive us. Twenty-nine of the stories, including “Up North,” were first published in the magazine.

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• 
  Another Man in the Street

  by Caryl Phillips (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

  This finespun and structurally intrepid novel follows a West Indian man, set on becoming a journalist, who immigrates to London in the nineteen-sixties. As the novel skips around in time—touching down, among other moments, just before the Second World War and in Thatcher’s era—it tells the stories of the immigrant and of two people he meets in London. One is a white Englishwoman who becomes his longtime partner and must, in the run-up to the millennium, reckon with obscured parts of his life. As the three grapple with various dislocations, they weigh the notion that they “must draw a veil across the past and never again attempt to peer behind it.”

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• 
  Rosarita

  by Anita Desai (Scribner)

  Fiction

  In this hushed, exacting novel, a woman from Delhi resettles in San Miguel de Allende, where she is forced to reckon with her past by an older stranger who claims to have known her late mother. The story follows the transplant as she skeptically trails her mysterious new guide across the supposed sites of her mother’s youth in a foreign land. Throughout their journey, the past’s influence on the present grows ever more pervasive, and the woman’s failure to escape her upbringing emerges as a failure to truly know it. The more she discovers of her mother’s life, the more haunting its opacity becomes.

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• 
  Embers of the Hands

  by Eleanor Barraclough (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  This lively history of the Viking Age—which lasted from roughly 750 to 1100 C.E.—moves beyond tales of seafaring warriors to capture everyday people: women, children, merchants, healers, walrus hunters. Given the scant evidence of these histories in the written record, Barraclough seeks them instead in archeological artifacts, from a rune stick found in the rubble of a tavern in Norway reading “GYDA SAYS THAT YOU SHOULD GO HOME” to an amber figurine of a swaddled baby found in Denmark. If each individual artifact reveals relatively little, the enormous array Barraclough assembles—from Scandinavia, Western Europe, Newfoundland, and trading posts as far east as present-day Russia—adds depth to the traditional portrait of Viking culture.

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• 
  Aflame

  by Pico Iyer (Riverhead)

  Nonfiction

  For more than three decades, Iyer, an essayist and a novelist, has spent several weeks a year at a silent retreat in a monastery in Big Sur, California. In this spare, delicately woven memoir, he combines portraits of the people he has encountered during his stays with crystalline descriptions of the natural setting and philosophical ruminations on the purposes of retreat. If Iyer’s ultimate goal is to illuminate a certain state of feeling—the incendiary sense of being alive hinted at in the title—his focus radiates outward: “It’s writing about the external world that feels most interior,” he tells a fellow silence-seeker. The result is a powerful work of observation in which deep truths seem to arise almost by accident.

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• 
  Mood Machine

  by Liz Pelly (Atria)

  Nonfiction

  Pelly’s book is a comprehensive look at how Spotify, the largest streaming platform in the world, profoundly changed how we listen and what we listen to. Founded in Sweden in 2006, the company quickly distinguished itself from other file-sharing services and music marketplaces by tracking the listening habits of its users, allowing it to anticipate what they might want to hear and when. Spotify began curating career-making playlists and feeding them to subscribers. Pelly sympathizes with artists who must contend with superstars like Adele and Coldplay for slots in these lineups, but her greatest concerns are for the listeners. For Pelly, it’s a problem less of taste than of autonomy—the freedom to exercise our own judgment, as we often did when encountering something new while listening to the radio or watching MTV. Spotify’s ingenuity in serving us what we like may keep us from what we love.

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  Read more: “Is There Any Escape from the Spotify Syndrome?,” by Hua Hsu
• 
  Playworld

  by Adam Ross (Knopf)

  Fiction

  Griffin, the teen-age protagonist of this engrossing coming-of-age novel, set on the Upper West Side in the early nineteen-eighties, is living an unusual childhood: an actor in a hit TV show, with parents in the performing arts, he longs to do normal-person things, like fall in love with someone his own age. But Naomi, a thirtysomething friend of his parents’, has other ideas for him, as does his abusive high-school wrestling coach. Onscreen, Griffin plays a superhero; if he has a superpower in real life, it is detachment. Things come to a head one fateful summer as, amid personal and family tumult, the maturing Griffin begins to inhabit his most important role: himself.

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