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These Stories Dance Deftly Between America And Cameroon

"A linguistic pole vaulter, Nkweti bends language like a master. Readers will enjoy her frequent, unique plays on words. 'I give good read,' says Their Girl in the story above. Or, in a riff on home invasions, 'Young and Astrid swapped home evasion stories involving synchronized watches and draconian parental curfews.' Or, this jarring description: 'The tea is raw and silken, larval.'...

'In 1904, Burt Bridges was a young husband — his wife Mary pregnant with their first child — and a successful shop owner with big dreams. He refused to surrender his store and "sell" his land to the white mayor of Holmesville, Mississippi. For keeping his livelihood and providing for his family, Burt Bridges was lynched. Bridges was the great grandfather of Cassandra Lane, author of We Are Bridges: A Memoir, which won the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize....

"Fans of Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) may be excited to learn that her debut novel, The Impudent Ones [Les Impudents], written in her mid-20s, has received its first English translation by Kelsey L. Haskett. Duras was celebrated during her lifetime. She won the Prix Goncourt and other praise for novels and screenplays, including Hiroshima Mon Amour, an iconic film directed by Alain Resnais.....

"Amidst a barrage of horrific news, The New York Times recently ran a story decrying shrinking rooftop spaces to raise pigeons. Pigeons, it turns out, are far more than urban pests that poop on passers-by below. They have a fascinating history spanning the globe. Matthew Gavin Frank's Flight of the Diamond Smugglers, set on South Africa's Diamond Coast in the northwest part of the country, is one example....

"Smashing the patriarchy is hard work. The Doctors Blackwell, by historian Janice P. Nimura, profiles two sisters who faced what was a daunting lack of choices for 19th century women. They achieved a series of near-impossible feats to become America's first and third certified women medical doctors. Nimura's account is not only an exhaustive biography, but also a window into egregious 19th century medical practices and the role these sisters played in building medical institutions....

"Brutality grinds on in Syria, but other horrific news drowns it out. In the cacophony of current events, it is heartening to remember that heroes emerge in unpredictable places. The Book Collectors, by Delphine Minoui, translated from French by Lara Vergnaud, depicts the savagery of Syrian President Bashar al Assad's regime contrasted with that life-saving symbol of civilization: a library....

"The Upswing follows Putnam's Our Kids, which decried narrowing social mobility for America's young people, and Bowling Alone, published in 2000, which became a bestseller. Sifting through evidence from nearly 500,000 interviews, Bowling Alone argued that Americans have become increasingly disconnected from one another. For this proposition, Putnam cited Americans' disintegrating participation in organizations such as bowling leagues, parent-teacher associations, and other volunteer groups that help weave together civil society....

"To say Zoellner is well-traveled is to say cheetahs run fast. He has logged tens of thousands of miles zigzagging the continent with a small tent, backpack, and hiking boots. His book is a fascinating investigation into American places and themes; metaphors for our country. Zoellner visits Spillville, Iowa where Czech composer Antonin Dvořák spent the summer of 1893, penning his famed Symphony No. 9, From the New World. Dvořák's Bohemian countrymen had been "the poorest of the poor" from Písek, Tábor, and Budějovice. Forty years later in Iowa, they were very well off....

"Desmond Meade's Let My People Vote: My Battle to Restore the Civil Rights of Returning Citizens is a compelling story about one man's rise from addiction, homelessness, and prison to run a successful campaign to re-enfranchise more than one million Florida voters. Meade had been toiling for years when he "burst" onto the national scene in 2018. In that year's election, more than 60 percent of Florida voters approved Amendment 4, a ballot initiative to restore voting rights to returning citizens (returning to society from prison)....

"America suffers continued, devastating fallout from chattel slavery. Our nation did not act alone; Europe's colonial powers also reaped mighty profits from the African slave trade. Marjoleine Kars' Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast is the "untold" account of the 1763-64 slave rebellion in Dutch Berbice (modern Guyana), predating the better-known Haitian slave rebellion by nearly three decades....

"Our twin pandemics in the forefront at the moment — racism and health — underscore a democracy in crisis. David Litt, author of Thanks, Obama and a speechwriter for the 44th president, has a prescription: Democracy In One Book Or Less: How it Works, Why It Doesn't, and Why Fixing It Is Easier Than You Think. Litt refreshingly debunks myths about our founders, pointing up false narratives and warped historical perceptions....

"In 1921, my grandmother moved from the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan to Rochester, New York to get married. There she lived until her death at age 109, outlasting my mother by eight years. Nana lived in a high rise close to Mom's childhood home, a home I came to know after Mom died. Rochester was a stark and lonely place for me. Sejal Shah's Rochester is altogether different. In her finely wrought, debut book of essays, This Is One Way To Dance, Rochester teems with extended family — a sprawling Gujarati community replete with weddings and parties and feasts and cousins-in-kind and playdates...

"Doty devotes the largest number of pages to Whitman's "uncharted desire," how Whitman navigates and proclaims queer sexuality. Doty's fascination is as a poet, teacher, and as a man. He's at the top of his game in these chapters, proceeding line by line through "Song of Myself" and other poems, sharing their impact on his life...

"Lisicky luxuriates in Provincetown, its accessible and public sex, its embrace of queerness, and the new normal that allows him to be the man he seeks to be. He courts risk; flirts with unsafe sex, which is to say flirts with death; but too, chooses life....

"'It did not have to be this way, and there was a time when it was not,' Adam Cohen writes in his introduction to Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court's Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America. America could have top-notch, racially integrated schools, a criminal justice system that hadn't ballooned to the world's largest by locking up generations of black and brown people, a political system that wasn't suffocating in money and a legal system that valued individuals over big business. Today, though, the likelihood of implementing such a vision looks dim....

"How can one mourn a parent whose harsh judgments frame childhood? This question haunts Philip Kennicott's Counterpoint: A Memoir of Bach and Mourning. Kennicott is the Washington Post's senior art and architecture critic. His book poses a second, equally challenging set of questions. "What does it mean to truly know a piece of music?" How to write about it? How to learn to play an instrument in a way that satisfies, while not embarking on a professional career?...

"Halfway through Garth Greenwell's exquisite story collection, Cleanness, the narrator and his boyfriend wander through a Bologna museum devoted to a single, unnamed artist. The narrator becomes transfixed by paintings "humming at a frequency I wanted to tune myself to catch." You don't need to have been to Bologna (I haven't) to recognize that Greenwell has discovered Giorgio Morandi, a twentieth century Italian painter whose small, haunting still lifes evoke mystery and wonder....

"Aarti Namdev Shahani reports on Silicon Valley for NPR. She's also the daughter of an immigrant who served time for a "felony." Her riveting memoir, Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares, recounts a story of personal success against the backdrop of her family's contorted, painful path to citizenship. Close-knit, they discovered the hard way that American justice is neither just nor colorblind....

"Sarah M. Broom's gorgeous debut, The Yellow House, reads as elegy and prayer. ... [She] is a writer of great intellect and breadth. She embraces momentous subjects. The Yellow House is about the relentless divestment of wealth from the African American family no matter how hard its members work; and our government's failure to protect its poor from predictable environmental catastrophe and subsequent trauma; and our gross neglect of poor neighborhoods; and sham promises that never materialize or are broken too easily, and the papering over of deep systemic problems by politicians and we the people. The Yellow House is also about the persistence of love and grit. There's a mother who never flags or fails to support her children....

"It's January 1987 in Greenwich Village and a wicked blizzard is blowing through town. Kaldheim is down and out, having hit rock bottom at age 37. He's burned through two wives, the second of whom died two years earlier from an aneurysm. Kaldheim is plagued with nightmares, drowning in shame that he didn't attend her funeral. He's on the run from his coke dealer, who doesn't suffer swindlers gladly. Catching the last bus out of New York, he finds himself headed for Richmond....

"Three Summers, by Magarita Liberaki [1919-2001], weaves a dreamy, cinematic tapestry of Greek village life. Originally published in 1946, the novel has been reissued, translated by Karen Van Dyck. It's set in the countryside around Athens, "where all the gardens were." Over the titular three summers, three sisters come of age in their divorced mother's home, alongside a cast of colorful characters: "Spinster" Aunt Theresa, Grandfather, Rodia the maid, who imparts family secrets; Mr. Louzis, Mother's admirer; droves of hungry local boys; and Miltos, the girls' father, who lives in Athens....

"Massoud Hayoun is a member of the Arab diaspora. With Moroccan, Egyptian, and Tunisian heritage, he is also Jewish. His new book, When We Were Arabs, is an absorbing family history that spans continents and epochs. Hayoun uses his grandparents' stories to illuminate the fading history of a once thriving Arab Jewish community. In the process, he delivers a scathing indictment of colonialism. He considers his Arabness "cultural," "African," and "Jewish," but "retaliatory" as well...

"The German viola I played during my serious music days failed to accrue value; twentieth century German instruments don't produce a warm enough sound. For tone, you need Italian or French or English. In some cases, American will do, as Gregory Spatz attests in his new collection. Set in and around Seattle, Spatz's What Could Be Saved plumbs the rarified world of high-end stringed instruments....

"In telling her Nana's story, Cary invites readers into a complex extended family, replete with the conflict and contradiction that accompany most families. At the same time, Cary recounts a distinctly American story: flight from racial terrorism in the south, economic and academic success against harsh odds, and the often-fraught mixing of races....

"Since its founding, America has been fertile ground for conspiracy beliefs. While every generation produces rumor-mongers, today we anoint them with special powers through social media .Anna Merlan, a journalist at Gizmodo Media Group, explores our contemporary fixation with conspiracy theories of all political stripes in Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power. Throughout the book, she reports from gatherings of people whose beliefs are both extreme and false....

"Can a writer put visual art on the page? Or render a visual artist's creative impulses into words?Now, Now, Louison is Jean Frémon's freewheeling effort to do so. Frémon — lawyer, writer and gallery owner — inhabits artist Louise Bourgeois as if she herself were writing this novel-cum-memoir. Elegantly translated by Cole Swensen, Now, Now, Louison portrays a woman whose mind never rests, whose capacious memory serves as a bottomless source of artistic inspiration....

"Who Killed My Father, by French writer Édouard Louis (lyrically translated by Lorin Stein), is a brief, poetic telling of the myriad ways societal contempt, homophobia, and poverty can kill a man.Following Louis' autobiographical novel, The End of Eddy, this book is a deeply personal meditation: a gay man speaking to a father mired in toxic masculinity, whose absence is louder than his presence, but who ultimately finds love and understanding — even respect — for that same son....

"J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy and Sarah Smarsh's Heartland present two views of America's rural-urban divide. Sounds Like Titanic captivates us with a third: a girl who grows up in an educated family in Appalachia, whose aspirations thrust her into a battle to support herself, but really enlist her in a war against a deeply unfair economic system. Hindman doesn't shrink from the big, systemic picture, but her fascinating personal story, with its unexpected twists, puts the memorable into this memoir....

"The year is 1919. Doc Bell's Miracle and Mirth Medicine Show — part circus, part sideshow, all charlatanism — travels rural America, trying to gin up enough audience to support the enterprise. The characters in Tonic and Balm, Stephanie Allen's debut novel, are the performers, roustabouts, fixers, and seamstresses who inhabit Doc Bell's self-contained world....

"I loved my mother and she died. Is that a story?" Yes, it is the story that Sarah McColl tells in her memoir, Joy Enough. Embedded in the question, which is the first line of the book, is McColl herself — how she grew up in the family that her mother Allison created, how she entered adulthood and married, how her marriage fell apart as Allison was dying. "Extinctions takes a hard look at the politics of adoption, cultural appropriation, loss, deracination, and professional frustration, without Wilson letting up her fictional grip....

"Extinctions takes a hard look at the politics of adoption, cultural appropriation, loss, deracination, and professional frustration, without Wilson letting up her fictional grip....

"Life in today's world can be frenetic and anxious; we are often too distracted to appreciate each other and our universe. Poetry demands that we pause and listen. 'A poem is something that can't otherwise be said addressed to someone who can't otherwise hear it....

"...Dear white people, please read this memoir. Dear America, please read this book. Kiese Laymon is a star in the American literary firmament, with a voice that is courageous, honest, loving, and singularly beautiful. Heavy is at once a paean to the Deep South, a condemnation of our fat-averse culture, and a brilliantly rendered memoir of growing up black, and bookish, and entangled in a family that is as challenging as it is grounding."

"... D'Eramo bears witness to her teenage years, which stand in sharp relief even against the great conflagration. Her version of youth is unimaginably extreme, and the telling of it carves out new territory. It is not simply D'Eramo's personal story, but also her ruthless quest for self-knowledge, that render Deviation a literary tour de force.

"Kaplan begins with the drama surrounding Justice Scalia's death on a west Texas ranch. He goes on to describe the behind the scenes dealings that led to the appointments of the sitting Supreme Court, and the even more 'inside baseball' of how these nine people vote. If you aren't a regular on the Washington cocktail circuit or a subscriber to SCOTUSblog, this material is presented at a level of granularity with which you may not be familiar. It makes for engaging, if not reassuring, reading....

"...Read American Hate for the faces Sethi puts on our national hate epidemic, and for his sobering account of the fallout — humiliation, terror, injury, and death. But read American Hate, as well, for what the last chapter terms "Hope in a Time of Despair." Hate may be rampant in America, but so are its antidotes: We must understand and own our history. We must speak out, for in community is power and love."

"Two-thirds of the way through Alexander Chee's How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, I abandoned my sharpened reviewer's pencil in favor of luxuriating in the words. Chee's writing has a mesmerizing quality; his sentences are rife with profound truths without lapsing into the didactic....

"Criminalization is frequently America's answer to social issues. This country criminalizes people experiencing drug addiction and homelessness, women seeking abortions, people who are LGBTQ, students who skip school, immigrants and refugees, and more....

"Rausing's core message is this: Addiction is a family affair. Her book embraces those surrounding the addict by courageously exposing her own self-doubt and heartache. She wants us to know her — her seemingly idyllic Swedish childhood, two caring parents raising three children...

"Innocence cases spotlight the many corruptions of our justice system: Mistakes beget mistakes — some intentional, some not. An epic bureaucracy protects a deeply flawed system. Thousands are wrongfully convicted. The National Registry of Exonerations calculates that over 18,000 years have been lost by innocent people serving time....

"My sister and I moved my grandmother to a nursing home when she was 107. Clearing out her apartment, we stumbled on a box of old papers. A crumbling leather portfolio emerged, overflowing with love poems written in her assertive hand. Love poems? ...

Listen below, or at NPR's website, where you can also read Martha's essay.

As 19th Century Females, Sisters In 'The Doctors Blackwell' Achieve Many Firsts​

'American Hate' Profiles Survivors, But Also Brings Hope|NPR Books

'Ghost Of The Innocent Man' Chronicles Justice Too Long Delayed|NPR Books

As 19th Century Females, Sisters In 'The Doctors Blackwell' Achieve Many Firsts