What’s New in Paperback: ‘WEB Du Bois’ Love Songs’ and ‘Bloodlands’


LOVE SONGS OF WEB DU BOIS, By Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. (Harper Perennial, 816 p., $20). Named one of Book Review’s Top 10 Books of 2021, this debut novel chronicles the converging stories of a Black girl growing up at the end of the 20th century and the “songs” of her Native American and enslaved African American ancestors. Our critic, Veronica Chambers, wrote that it was “the best book I’ve read in a very, very long time.”

BLOOD AREAS: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, By Timothy Snyder. (Basic Books, 592 pp., $22.99.) First published in 2012, Snyder’s updated account of the horrific murders by Nazi and Soviet forces in the region between Germany and Russia (Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic region and Belarus) includes the author’s reflections on the current global situation.

SEMICOLON: The Past, Present and Future of a Misunderstood Brand, By Cecelia Watson. (Ecco, 224 p., $16.99.) This “biography” chronicles the life of the semicolon, from its origins in Venice in the late 15th century to its dwindling use today. Former Times critic Parul Sehgal noted that Watson covered a vast expanse of land “as it swung back and forth like a sandpiper on the edge of the Great Debates of language.”

I NEVER PROMISED YOU A ROSE GARDEN, by Joanne Greenberg. (Penguin Classics, 304 p., $17.) A reprint of Greenberg’s 1964 novel, where a 16-year-old with schizophrenia spends three years in a psychiatric hospital trying to escape an imaginary world. RV Cassill, who first reviewed the book for The Times, described it as “the fitting conclusion of a flight from the Old World to the New.”

INTERRUPTED JOURNEY: Two Lost Hours in a UFO: The Kidnapping of Betty and Barney Hill, by John Fuller. (Vintage, 464 p., $18.) In this column of the alien abduction narrative, first published in 1966, a New Hampshire couple share the story of their abduction by a UFO while driving on a deserted road on a summer night in 1961. It is considered the first modern claim of such an encounter. .

THREE RINGS: The Story of Exile, Narrative and Destiny, By Daniel Mendelsohn. (New York Review Books, 128 p., $15.95.) This book brings together the story of three exiled writers who turn to the classics and blend memoir, biography, history, and criticism, and who, as our critic Becca Rothfeld comments, turn to the classics to tell a story that, as our critic Becca Rothfeld comments, “is so wild with connections that it elicits both paranoia. and magic.”



Source link

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *