OLGA DIES DREAMING, by Xochitl Gonzalez. (Flatiron, $27.99.) Liberation is at the heart of this debut novel about a wedding planner who is the daughter of a revolutionary. Gonzalez’s thoughtful story grapples with questions of how to break free from a mother’s manipulations, from shame, from pride indistinguishable from fear, from abandonment, from oppression and from greed. “What is the American dream these days, anyway?” Maggie Shipstead writes in her review. “It’s worth wondering what, exactly, we’re supposed to be dreaming of. Olga Acevedo, the title character in Xochitl Gonzalez’s debut novel, ‘Olga Dies Dreaming,’ struggles mightily with this question.”
ANTHEM, by Noah Hawley. (Grand Central, $29.) In his sixth novel, which imagines an epidemic of teenage suicides in the years after Covid wanes, Hawley (also the showrunner for the popular TV series “Fargo”) taps into our existential anxiety about the fragility of adolescent mental health, channeling it into a hefty page-turner that’s equal parts horrific, catastrophic and entertaining. “Speaking to Hawley’s talents as a screenwriter, his dialogue brings the characters alive. Again and again, the exchanges are humorous, sad and revealing,” S. Kirk Walsh writes in her review. “Hawley’s concerns as a father ground this plump, pyrotechnic novel, giving its dramatic violence and outcome more depth and meaning. Instead of making the teenagers victims, Hawley gives them agency and power in a collapsing world.”
MRS PALFREY AT THE CLAREMONT, by Elizabeth Taylor. (New York Review Books, paper, $15.95.) Taylor’s penultimate novel, originally published in 1971, follows old folks eking out their retirement years in a residential hotel. A portrait of Britain at the end of empire, with a bottomless capacity for the hilarious and ridiculous, it affirms Taylor’s place among the best fictional minds of her generation. “Possessed of the quality of total composure and attention — so that the whole is present in every part of a given book — Taylor was a novelist from the tips of her fingers to the depths of her brain,” Geoff Dyer writes in his review. “Was there any better chronicler of English life as it unfolded in the 30-year period after the end of World War II?”
EMOTIONAL: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking, by Leonard Mlodinow. (Pantheon, $28.95.) Mlodinow’s stimulating new book shrewdly considers the ways emotions influence our thinking, with compelling examples and attention to the latest research. “Since mind, brain and body are one, it’s impossible to disentangle our vaunted rationality from the emotions,” Frans de Waal writes in his review. “Mlodinow handles this topic astutely. … He writes in a brisk, friendly style that easily draws you in and makes you reflect on both the recounted anecdotes and your own way of handling comparable situations.”
CALL ME CASSANDRA, by Marcial Gala. Translated by Anna Kushner. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) This novel’s young narrator has believed from an early age that he is Cassandra, the Trojan priestess whose prophecies go unheeded. Gala alternates between the hero’s troubled adolescence in 1970s Cuba and his military service in Angola, drawing a haunting depiction of an outsider trapped in the wrong body. Marcela Valdes, reviewing the book, calls it a “dazzling” novel: “Deftly pushing the boundaries of both realism and first-person perspective, Gala … makes it impossible for the reader to determine if Raúl/Cassandra is actually supernatural or if the character’s visions are a Mittyish reaction to the many humiliations and brutalities that he/she must endure.”
JIM HARRISON: Complete Poems, edited by Joseph Bednarik. (Copper Canyon, $40.) Famed for fiction, Harrison was also a poet of prodigious appetites. Pleasure and mortality are the twin themes of this mammoth and comprehensive collection, spanning his career from his 1965 debut to his 2016 death. “Acknowledging pleasure’s costs, and its ultimate ephemerality, is the unavoidable flip side of Harrison’s celebratory hedonism,” Troy Jollimore writes in his review. “American approaches to the spiritual have always emphasized the physical, either by attempting to purify the body or by embracing its lusts and limitations. Harrison takes the second route, reminding us, as the Christian mystics liked to, that everything that is sacred and holy must become material and enfleshed to enter our lives.”
