Bookworm

Rachel Kushner’s “The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020” is a career-spanning collection of nineteen essays.

Rita Dove’s new book of poetry, “Playlist for the Apocalypse,” goes in many different historical and personal directions.

Wayne Koestenbaum’s first book of short fiction, “The Cheerful Scapegoat,” is a spectacularly odd and original collection of whimsical, surreal, baroque, ribald, and heartbreaking fables.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Klara and the Sun” is a novel focused on a small group of people in a robot future.

A retrospective of Kazuo Ishiguro, the 2017 Nobel laureate in literature.

The debut novel of Robert Jones, Jr., “The Prophets,” is lyrical prose about the dimensionality and interiority of people.

Carol Edgarian’s “Vera” is the story of a strong, capable, and independent girl whose voice is the voice of the book.

A tribute to the co-founder of the highly influential independent bookstore and publisher City Lights, renowned poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses his new novel, “The Committed,” the follow-up to his Pulitzer-winning “The Sympathizer,” and the second entry in a planned trilogy. It brings Nguyen’s storytelling further into the philosophy of refugees, feminism, communism, anti-communism and more—the terror of both the American war in Vietnam and the French presence in Vietnam, along with the Vietnamese presence in America andFrance. This is duality enacted as a writing method; this is a union between theory and fiction. A novel of ideas and politics and history and theory, but also a crime novel. A novel you’re not born knowing how to read, and you might have to reread it, this is exciting contemporary literature.

Ben’s life falls down around him, and he’s the protagonist, in A Wonderful Stroke of Luck, by master writer Ann Beattie.