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A Family Saga That Stays Calm Through Tumultuous Times

Jessica Shattuck’s “Last House” dips into the cultural intrigues of 20th-century America, but keeps its nose surprisingly clean.

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By Kate Christensen

Kate Christensen is the author, most recently, of the novel “Welcome Home, Stranger.”

LAST HOUSE: or, The Age of Oil, by Jessica Shattuck

Jessica Shattuck’s new novel, “Last House,” opens with a two-page list echoing the book’s subtitle, “The Age of Oil” — a cheeky ode to the ubiquity of petroleum-based products that suggests a sort of 21st-century answer to Upton Sinclair’s fast-paced satirical novel “Oil!” Instead, we get a richly detailed, slow-burning family saga distinguished by incisive psychological insight and masterful research. “Last House” brings to life several generations of the Taylor family, who, in different ways, are all involved in the social and political tumult of the second half of the 20th century.

In the prologue, we meet Nick Taylor, an earnest, fresh-faced 30-year-old junior lawyer for American Oil, on a plane over Iran’s Abadan oil field. He gazes out the window, marveling at this “vast and complex apparatus for harvesting the lifeblood of modernity,” while his colleagues heedlessly kibitz and swill booze around him.

One of these men is a former Yale classmate, the golden boy Carter Weston, “a fourth-generation prep-school type” who is dissolute and cocky, and therefore, we expect, will become the instrument of Nick’s eventual downfall. I licked my chops and settled in for a takedown of the oil industry’s evils, looking forward to watching Nick’s ideals crumble, his soul corroding in the acid of his own venal complicity.

The novel opens in the spring of 1953 in Mapleton, Conn., where Nick and his wife, Bet, a well-educated, upwardly mobile young couple, have relinquished their intellectual and artistic ambitions to live in this suburban bedroom community and raise a son and a daughter as they reap the bounty of postwar American largesse, a situation rife with dark undercurrents of marital and existential despair.

But instead of delivering on its foreshadowings, the narrative proffers and then whisks away one juicy dramatic possibility after another, letting every potential chance for interesting conflict gently deflate into internal reflection. Nick’s job troubles him far less than the novel’s beginning suggests it will, and Bet’s forfeiture of her desire to get a Ph.D. in literature to be a mother and housewife troubles her even less. The “javelin of resentment” her husband feels from her on Page 2 never reaches its target or shows its point again.

Because Nick and Bet largely seem to be essentially, mutually contented with the underpinnings of their lives, nothing is ever really at stake for them. Their children flourish, more or less. Nick’s job gives them the means to buy a Vermont vacation home, the titular “last house.” Their marriage is a steady ship plowing straight through Carter’s decades-long attempt to seduce Bet; she’s aware of it and mildly intrigued, but never truly torn or tempted. Any tension that arises between or within the Taylors somehow seems to dissipate by morning.

Fast-forward to Part 2, to the Taylor children’s coming-of-age as baby boomers circa 1968, when political turmoil and social explosion are in full swing. But the muted, genteel tone of the novel’s opening section continues into this exciting new American era, via the first-person voice of Katherine Taylor, Nick and Bet’s daughter, now in her early 20s. As with the beginning of the novel, her narrative is ripe for drama: She writes for a countercultural newspaper and hangs out with radicals in New York as her younger brother, Harry, becomes increasingly caught up in ecological activism.

But Katherine, instead of plunging into the passionate heat of her time, works hard and views her comrades from a distance, with a tinge of condescension. Much as she’d like to join in the rebellious fun, at least in theory, her proper Connecticut upbringing — her parents’ “sense of How to Be” — is too ingrained to allow her to “hoot and holler down the hillside, shirtless, T-shirt tucked into your back pocket, or to slink across the stream braless, hips swishing seductively. I was irritated with all of them.” Along with the novel, she watches primly from the bank.

All the real drama in “Last House” seems to happen offstage. A violent event, the culmination of Harry’s ecological despair, should be the novel’s dark tragic center; instead, it remains frustratingly murky, as does its aftermath. The book’s aura of well-behaved detachment is especially disappointing because Shattuck is such a good writer, giving us swaths of cultural and historical background as gracefully and intelligently as she parses the emotional depths of her characters. Every note in the novel rings clear and true, but it never comes fully to life in the way that matters.

Maybe the “comfort and ease” of the Taylors’ marriage, Bet thinks early on, “diminished a certain excitement and offered honesty in its place.” The same might be said of this admirable, ambitious novel.

LAST HOUSE : Or, The Age of Oil | By Jessica Shattuck | William Morrow | 336 pp. | $28

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The New York Times Reveals Their 10 Best Books Of 2021

Carina Pereira

Carina Pereira, born in ‘87, in Portugal. Moved to Belgium in 2011, and to Rotterdam, The Netherlands, in 2019. Avid reader, changing interests as the mods strikes. Whiles away the time by improvising stand-up routines she’ll never get to perform. Books are a life-long affair, audiobooks a life-changing discovery of adulthood. Selling books by day, writer by night. Contact

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As the end of the year approaches, various platforms start putting together a selection of the books they believe deserve to have the literary spotlight of the last 365 days.

From Goodreads Choice Awards , to the Top Five Books Of The Year At Amazon , these lists are often a great way to compare what is going around our own social media bubble, and what the mainstream media and platforms deem the best of. (Amazon’s list has one book in common with the New York Times. Read this whole post and see if you can guess which one before you click that link.)

Book Riot is obviously not an exception in this matter – we are always down to tell you all about our favourite reads – and you can check out the books we held most dear to our hearts in 2021 here .

The 10 Best Books Of The Year as it is currently presented by The New York Times has been going on since pretty much the beginning of the Book Review magazine, back in 1896.

After several changes across the years, in 2004 the list has taken the shape that is still being used today: as fall arrives, the editors start reading, discussing, and choosing what will become their definitive list of the ten best books of the year.

These are their choices for 2021:

• How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue
• Intimacies by Katie Kitamura
• The Love Song Of W. E. B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
• No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
• When We Cease To Understand The World by Benjamín Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West
• The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen, translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman
• How The Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With The History Of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith
• Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope In An American City by Andrea Elliott
• On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed
• Red Comet: The Short Life And Blazing Art Of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark

As it’s common with the New York Times 10 Best Books Of The Year lists, the first five books are labelled under the genre literary fiction, and the other five are works of non-fiction, although Labatut is said to stand on the edge of both.

This year’s list includes two books in translation. Or, if we are in the mood to be pedantic, we can say it actually includes four, since Ditlevsen’s are actually three books put together and they can be found and purchased on their own (nice little way to include 12 books in a list of 10, New York Times!). Likewise, you’ll find several important works around social justice themes, including class and race, both fiction and non-fiction.

The Love Songs Of W.E.B Du Bois was one of the picks of Oprah’s Book Club 2021. It was also nominated for Time’s best books of 2021. Similarly, other books on the above list also fell under the Time’s 2021 best of non-fiction: Juneteenth , How The Word Is Passed , Invisible Child , and The Copenhagen Trilogy .

Fifty percent of the books nominated were written by authors of colour. Last year, this same list included forty percent authors of colour.

Read more about each of the 10 books listed above in this link. And for those with full access to the New York Times website, here are 100 Notable Books released in 2021 that their editors put together.

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May 23, 2024

Current Issue

Reading, Reading, Reading

May 11, 2024

Jonathan Michael Castillo

Peter Baker

This article is part of a regular series of conversations with the Review ’s contributors; read past ones here and sign up for our e-mail newsletter to get them delivered to your inbox each week.

Two thirds of the way into Peter C. Baker’s review of a recent translation of The Wall , a 1963 postapocalyptic novel by Marlen Haushofer, he arrives at a series of questions that underlie mysteries, science fiction, and, implicitly, literature as a whole: “Why write? Why describe your life for others? Why do anything at all?” In The Wall , Baker observes, Haushofer comes at these questions “sideways”: the narrator, writing in her journal while trapped alone in the Austrian forest, discovers that “her worries over life’s purpose . . . ring louder and louder, too loud to possibly ignore.”

Baker is a critic and novelist; he has covered music, Silicon Valley, and books for The New York Times Magazine , The New Yorker , and The Guardian . For our pages, he has written about the rise in pedestrian fatalities in America , Nicholson Baker , and the Chicago Police Department’s history of torturing Black people . His first novel, Planes , was published in 2022. I e-mailed him this week to ask about genre fiction, Chicago, and how to get any reading done when you have small children.

Daniel Drake: When did you first encounter The Wall ? What struck you about the book at the time, and what changed in your understanding of it upon rereading?

Peter C. Baker: I stumbled on The Wall fifteen years ago in a used bookstore in Rome. I was on vacation by myself and tore through it in a day, having one of those totally absorbing reading experiences that seem to get rarer as we get older. I wasn’t doing much analysis at all, just reading, reading, reading. Completely immersed. On subsequent readings, and especially after becoming a novelist myself, I made more of an attempt to look under the hood at the book’s machinery. As far as I can tell, Haushofer produced its disorienting (but completely absorbing) atmosphere by combining the mood of a parable with the moment-to-moment density of closely observed realism. And then it turns out not to be a parable at all. There’s no lesson, no moral. Over time, I’ve come to see this void—the space into which the novel lures us on a search for easy meaning—as the source of its gravity.

Do you otherwise have an attachment to sci-fi or last-man stories? It seemed in your review that some of what you liked about the book was how it bucked genre conventions, but are there literary genres that appeal to you?

I’ve read a lot of sci-fi, including my share of last-man stories, but my “genre” reading has been even more random than my “literary” reading. (I count myself among those who believe that “literary” fiction is just another genre, but I haven’t solved the problem of what to call it.) My knowledge of the genre landscape is much spottier, although I’ve never felt much insecurity about that.

Lately, to my surprise, I’ve been reading lots of detective novels. My interest in the crimes and their solutions is fairly minimal. It’s more about how the structure of a mystery—the constant awareness, as a reader, that at any moment you could be encountering a clue—makes everything sparkle a little, even if it’s just the detective deciding which diner to go to, or what kind of drink to have, what kind of music to put on. It’s amazing how much of the writing in some detective novels is about this kind of stuff. Quotidian life caught in prose: this is exactly the effect a lot of “literary” writing is after, and detective fiction has this basically built-in shortcut. In fact, I’ve been so taken with the genre that for my next novel I’ve decided to try my hand at it.

I know you also as a Chicago writer—you have written for our pages about the legacy of the Chicago Police Department’s torture policies. Do you identify with the city? What might distinguish a Chicago writer, if such could be said to exist?

I live in Evanston, a small suburban city just across Chicago’s northern border. I’ve lived here for just over a decade. Which I think, by local metrics, makes me a fairly recent arrival. What Chicago needs is the same thing every place in America needs: more storytellers who, instead of using the place as a readymade symbol of X or Y (especially of “The Midwest,” in Chicago’s case), help us shrug off these lazy shorthands and see how weird and varied our country is.

Of course, I hope that my eventual detective novel will make some kind of contribution. Much of the country is obsessed with ideas about “crime in Chicago.” How do you tell a Chicago crime story that doesn’t play into those simplistic narratives, that’s aware of but floats free of a shallow national discourse populated by the laziest tropes imaginable? And how do you do that without ending up with something that just reads like media criticism? A novel can’t be an exercise in correcting misconceptions: it needs more, it needs an energy and spirit and style of its own.

As a novelist and critic, how do you find that either practice informs the other?

My gold standard for a novel is whether it’s doing something that only a novel can do, or that a novel can do best. The most obvious example is that novels shouldn’t read like movie treatments: they should behave, at least some of the time, in ways that are fundamentally unfilmable. Otherwise the writer isn’t really doing their job as a steward of their own tradition.

Writing literary criticism over the years—being forced to think hard about why something works or doesn’t, and by virtue of which textual properties—helped me articulate this standard. Which, as a fiction writer, I’m grateful for. I think it helps me stay on a path that leads to work I’m going to be able to live with.

Incidentally, I don’t apply anything like the same standard to my criticism. I’m not trying to tend to or advance the tradition of the book review, I’m just trying to be clear and engaging within a format that I take, for my purposes, to be relatively fixed. There are other critics— Patricia Lockwood is a good example—who do more pioneering stuff. I really admire those writers, and sometimes I envy them too. But it’s just not me! Sometimes I think maybe the particular pressure I put on my fiction is so intense that I don’t have any left for my criticism and magazine writing. I keep my goals much more modest, and I’m more content with the simple idea of giving readers some information or context or perspective about a book that they might not already have.

What have you been reading lately?

Part of my answer is that I’m reading short essays people have sent me for Tracks on Tracks , a new project of mine. It’s a magazine that comes out one piece at a time, via an e-mail newsletter; each piece sees a writer (often but not always me) describing their relationship to an individual song. I imagine it like a grown-up version of sitting up late in a dorm room listening to new friends play their favorite music.

Beyond that? I’m a parent to a three-year-old and a one-year-old, and I’m reading less than I have at any point since I was nine or ten. It’s been a big adjustment, a huge change in my daily mental inputs. And the question of what I’ll read next has become a mystery to me. I pick things up that look good—big stacks of books from the library—and I don’t read more than a few pages of most of them. Something has to feel just right in a way I can’t articulate. It’s often, as I said, detective fiction that does the trick. I recently got into Lawrence Block. His main character, the private eye Matthew Scudder, starts out as a heavy drinker, but then, a few books in, starts going to Alcoholics Anonymous. The mystery he’s working on is always running parallel to his sobriety journey. It’s great.

It’s occurring to me that private eyes are a lot like freelance writers. We work alone. We get paid by the job. Some assignments are better than others, and some end up being dreadful, and there’s no foolproof way of screening out the dreadful ones. What we learn from one job carries over to the next, or at least we hope it does.

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Peter C. Baker’s first novel, Planes , was published in 2022. He is currently working on a detective novel set in Chicago. (April 2024)

Daniel Drake is on the editorial staff of The New York Review of Books .

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The ‘New York Times’ Names Its Best Books of 2022

BY Michael Schaub • Nov. 28, 2022

The New York Times unveiled its list of the 10 best books of 2022, with titles by Hernan Diaz, Jennifer Egan, and Ed Yong among those making the cut.

Diaz’s Trust was one of five fiction books to make the list. The newspaper called the novel, about a wealthy New York couple in the early 20th century, “an exhilarating pursuit.” Earlier this year, the novel was the winner of the Kirkus Prize for fiction.

Egan’s The Candy House , a sequel to her Pulitzer Prize–winning A Visit From the Goon Squad , also made the fiction list, with the Times calling it “a glorious, hideous fun house.” The other honored works of fiction were Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19 , Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead , and  Namwali Serpell’s The Furrows .

In nonfiction, Yong was honored for An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us , his book about animal perception. The Times praised Yong’s book, which was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in nonfiction, as “a terrific storyteller.”

Linda Villarosa’s Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation made the nonfiction list, along with Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves , Rachel Aviv’s Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us , and Hua Hsu’s Stay True .

Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.

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Here Are the 14 New Books You Should Read in May

These are independent reviews of the products mentioned, but TIME receives a commission when purchases are made through affiliate links at no additional cost to the purchaser.

F rom Brittney Griner ’s eagerly anticipated memoir to a long-awaited sequel to Colm Tóibín’s beloved novel Brooklyn , the best books coming in May offer a range of choices for every reader. Those looking for a good laugh should check out the latest high-society comedy from Crazy Rich Asians author Kevin Kwan or filmmaker Miranda July’s first novel in 10 years, which offers a profoundly humorous take on menopause and mortality. R.O. Kwon ’s sensual followup to her 2018 best-seller The Incendiaries is sure to keep readers on their toes, while scholar Deborah Paredez’s tribute to America’s finest divas offers an important lesson in pop-culture etymology.    

Here, the 14 new books to read this month.

Coming Home , Brittney Griner (May 7)

On Feb. 17, 2022, WNBA player Brittney Griner was detained in Russia , where she played professionally in the offseason, for possessing cannabis oil, a substance that is illegal in the country. (At the time, Griner’s Russian lawyers stated that she had been prescribed medical cannabis for pain management by her doctors in the U.S.) The celebrated athlete was sentenced to nine years in prison for drug smuggling and served in a Russian penal colony until the U.S. government was able to broker a prisoner swap in December 2022, trading her for convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout . Griner’s memoir, Coming Home, which she co-authored with Michelle Burford, details all of this and more, offering a raw look at the harrowing experience that has turned her into an outspoken advocate for Americans who have been wrongfully detained abroad .

Buy Now : Coming Home on Bookshop | Amazon

Shanghailanders , Juli Min (May 7)

Juli Min’s ambitious debut novel, Shanghailanders, is a thrilling, futuristic family drama that captures the joys, disappointments, and inside jokes of one Shanghai family in reverse chronological order. Starting in 2040 and working its way back to 2014, the book unspools the shared and separate lives of the wealthy Yangs: Chinese real estate investor Leo, his elegant Japanese French wife Eko, their precocious eldest daughters Yumi and Yoko, and the baby of the family, aspiring actress Kiko. By giving readers the gift of hindsight, Min shows how one enigmatic family falls apart and comes back together over several decades.

Buy Now : Shanghailanders on Bookshop | Amazon

Long Island , Colm Tóibín (May 7)

Best-selling Irish author Colm Tóibín returns with Long Island, a well-observed sequel to his much loved 2009 novel Brooklyn , set 20 years after Eilis, the inscrutable heroine of the aforementioned book, emigrated from Ireland. Picking up in the spring of 1976, Eilis, now in her 40s, is still married to Italian American plumber Tony Fiorello and living in the titular suburbs outside of New York City with their two teenage children and her in-laws. All is well, if a little boring, until she is confronted by an irate Irishman who claims Tony has gotten his wife pregnant and he plans to leave the baby on Eilis’ doorstep once it’s born. Tóibín’s 11th novel offers an absorbing look at a middle-aged woman at a crossroads in not only her marriage, but also in a life she worries has gone unfulfilled.

Buy Now : Long Island on Bookshop | Amazon

The Skunks , Fiona Warnick (May 7)

In Fiona Warnick’s quirky debut, The Skunks, Isabel returns to her hometown after college graduation to take on a few odd jobs and figure out what she wants to do with her life. To take her mind off of her post-adolescent fears and anxieties, she starts thinking about the book’s titular creatures. Specifically, the three baby skunks that unexpectedly show up in the yard of the place she is house sitting. Their presence forces her to ponder life’s existential questions—and question her own romantic desires. The Skunks is a hilarious look at post-grad life and the loneliness, uncertainty, and occasional joy that comes with it.

Buy Now : The Skunks on Bookshop | Amazon

All Fours , Miranda July (May 14)

Filmmaker, artist, and best-selling author Miranda July’s first novel in a decade is an intimate, fearless, and sexy coming-of-middle-age story about a woman hellbent on reinventing herself. All Fours begins with the unnamed narrator, a 45-year-old semi-famous artist, learning that someone has been peering into her window with a telephoto lens. She decides to leave her husband and child behind to drive from Los Angeles to New York for a writing retreat. Unfortunately, she only makes it as far as Monrovia, Calif., less than an hour from home. It’s there she finds herself tackling fluctuating hormones, an increased libido, and a rather impractical motel room renovation in this wonderfully weird adventure.

Buy Now : All Fours on Bookshop | Amazon

Blue Ruin , Hari Kunzru (May 14)

Hari Kunzru ’s seventh novel, Blue Ruin, is a provocative portrait of a once-promising artist as a disillusioned man of a certain age. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Jay, a 40-something undocumented performance artist, is living out of his car and delivering groceries to wealthy residents in upstate New York. On one of his runs, he finds himself face-to-face with Alice, a woman he dated nearly two decades earlier. Alice invites him to ride out the crisis in the luxurious home where she is quarantining with her painter husband, the art school rival for whom she ghosted Jay. The unexpected run-in leads to a possible big career break for Jay, who worries the deal may just cost him his soul.

Buy Now : Blue Ruin on Bookshop | Amazon

This Strange Eventful History , Claire Messud (May 14)

This Strange Eventful History is a sprawling yet intimate saga that draws inspiration from author Claire Messud’s own family history. (She has called this novel, her seventh, the “most significant work” of her life.) Spanning several decades, from 1940 to 2010, Messud follows the Cassar family, a fictional French Algerian clan first displaced by World War II, and again, nearly 20 years later, by Algeria’s war of independence . With great empathy, Messud shows the effects war, colonialism, and later sovereignty had on three generations of the Cassars, most notably, the family’s youngest member, aspiring writer Chloe, a stand-in for Messud, who believes the truth will finally set her relatives free.

Buy Now : This Strange Eventful History on Bookshop | Amazon

Very Bad Company , Emma Rosenblum (May 14)

With her latest novel, Very Bad Company , best-selling author and journalist Emma Rosenblum takes a page from Rian Johnson ’s Knives Out playbook. Despite her lack of experience, former TV producer Caitlin Levy is hired as the new head of events at Aurora, a trendy ad-tech startup led by an eccentric CEO. To welcome her to the team, Caitlin is invited to take part in Aurora’s annual corporate retreat in Miami. This year, the company is preparing for an impending billion-dollar merger. But when one of Aurora’s high-level executives turns up dead, everyone on sight is forced to ignore the crisis so as to not sink the deal. What ensues is a darkly funny mystery about toxic corporate culture.

Buy Now : Very Bad Company on Bookshop | Amazon

In Tongues , Thomas Grattan (May 21)

In Thomas Grattan’s rollicking sophomore release, In Tongues, the charming if naive Gordon moves from Minnesota to New York City where he gets a job walking the dogs of Manhattan’s elite, including gallery owners Phillip and Nicola. Soon he is hobnobbing and bed-hopping with the high-powered couple, turning their lives upside down with little regard for the consequences of his actions. In this delightfully modern comedy of manners, Gordon wonders if he has the ability to change his ways as he begins to understand the damage his impulses have caused.

Buy Now : In Tongues on Bookshop | Amazon

Lies and Weddings , Kevin Kwan (May 21)

From Kevin Kwan , the author of Crazy Rich Asians, a high comedy sure to delight fans of Jane Austen . Rufus Leung Gresham, the protagonist of Lies and Weddings , is the future Earl of Greshambury (a clever nod to the fictional setting of Anthony Trollope’s 1858 novel Doctor Thorne ) and son of a former Hong Kong supermodel. He’s also been buried underneath a mountain of debt thanks to his family’s reckless spending. To dig himself out, Rufus’ always scheming mother suggests he find a wealthy woman to marry at his sister’s upcoming high-society wedding. What could possibly go wrong?

Buy Now : Lies and Weddings on Bookshop | Amazon

Exhibit , R. O. Kwon (May 21)

R. O. Kwon’s Exhibit is a hypnotic queer love story full of lust and longing. The sultry novel follows two women, talented photographer Jin and injured prima ballerina Lidija, and the ancient familial curse that stands to keep them apart. Exhibit is a haunting romance about desire, obsession, and ambition that is sure to get your heart rate up.

Buy Now : Exhibit on Bookshop | Amazon

American Diva , Deborah Paredez (May 21)

Fifteen years ago, poet and cultural critic Deborah Paredez tackled the posthumous legacy of Selena Quintanilla with Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory . Now, with American Diva, she has put together an insightful ode to the famous women— Aretha Franklin , Tina Turner , and Serena Williams , to name a few—who have come to embody the often misconstrued term. Combining cultural criticism and memoir, Paredez shows how the word “diva,” once used to describe a powerhouse opera singer, evolved to become a condemnation of confident and powerful women, many of whom are women of color. American Diva is Paredez’s attempt to reclaim the word.

Buy Now : American Diva on Bookshop | Amazon

Accordion Eulogies , Noé Álvarez (May 28)

Growing up, Noé Álvarez’s working class Mexican immigrant parents rarely spoke of his larger-than-life grandfather. All Álvarez ever knew of the relative who was more myth than man was that he played the accordion and possibly put a curse on his descendents with his questionable behavior. In his poignant new memoir, Accordion Eulogies, Álvarez traces the history of the humble titular instrument in hopes of better understanding his own family’s mysterious lineage. With empathy and humor, the author dares to find the root cause of his generational trauma with the hope of finally breaking the cycle.

Buy Now : Accordion Eulogies on Bookshop | Amazon

In These Streets , Josiah Bates (May 28)

With In These Streets, journalist and former TIME reporter Josiah Bates takes a closer look at the recent surge in gun violence throughout the United States, particularly in marginalized communities. Bates travels the country speaking with those on the frontlines of what many have deemed a public health crisis that has only gotten worse since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. He interviews victims, perpetrators, activists, law enforcement, and academics in hopes of gaining new insight into the epidemic.

Buy Now : In These Streets on Bookshop | Amazon

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A Motel Room of One’s Own

Miranda july’s best book yet is a spectacularly horny story about pursuing sexual and creative freedom..

This review contains spoilers for Miranda July’s novel All Fours.

At a gynecologist appointment about halfway through Miranda July’s new novel, All Fours , the narrator finds herself seated in a waiting room with two other women, one young and pregnant and the other about 75. She imagines the pregnant woman’s thoughts: “She was in the midst of something very exciting, very right, and after this phase there would be a baby, and it was unclear what would happen to her after that but probably more good stuff! Better and better!” Then she tries to wrap her mind around what’s going on between the older woman’s legs: “gray labia, long and loose, ball sacks emptied of their balls.” In between these two poles the narrator sits, age 45. She’s done with reproduction, so there’s nothing to look forward to except ball-sack labia … unless, somehow, she finds some new adventure to fill the terrifying blank space looming in the middle of her life! Doing so will require finding an escape portal from her current existence, if she’s only brave and reckless enough to find that portal and enter.

The narrator is an L.A.-based multimedia artist — “picture a woman who had success in several mediums at a young age” — not unlike Miranda July . Also like July, she is queer and married to a man, a fellow creative type, raising a nonbinary child. She is haunted by literal and metaphorical death. Her child was almost stillborn. Her grandmother jumped out of a window at age 55 because “she couldn’t bear to see her looks go,” and then 23 years later, her aunt jumped out of the same window. But while the narrator is ruminating on the death-in-life that looms for women when they run out of estrogen, she is, for what she fears is a limited time only, hornier than a teenage boy. She masturbates, over the course of the novel, approximately ten times, has sex nine times, and at one point experiences an exquisite moment of intimacy when someone else removes her bloody tampon.

Before reading All Fours , I was a Miranda July agnostic. I liked her quirky, character-driven movies fine. Her previous books, the story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You and novel The Last Bad Man, with their casts of lonely, idiosyncratic personalities, left me feeling respectful but essentially unmoved, like, “Okay, here’s another thing July has proved she can do.” But All Fours possessed me. I picked it up and neglected my life until the last page, and then I started begging every woman I know to read it as soon as possible.

I’ve never read a novel where perimenopause is so explicitly foregrounded, which is strange, because it’s a cascade of disruptive changes that happen to approximately half the population for about ten years before their periods finally stop. The narrator becomes haunted by a chart she discovers online titled “Sex Hormones Over Life Span,” which she interprets to mean she has only a brief window left in her life during which she might experience sexual desire. The tension that propels the book becomes: Can the narrator avoid destroying her marriage and her relationship with her kid while still pursuing the total sexual and creative freedom that her countdown clock requires? And if so, how ?

At the novel’s outset, sex with the narrator’s husband, Harris, is fine, occasionally better than fine, but requires some mental warm-up, maybe some props. She never craves it, exactly, but appreciates its necessity in the context of her marriage: “Sometimes I could hear Harris’s dick whistling impatiently like a teakettle, at higher and higher pitches until I finally couldn’t take it so I initiated.” She compares notes with her lesbian friend Jordi and determines that her approach to sex is “mind-rooted,” while Jordi’s is “body-rooted.” Jordi describes typical sex with her wife — half-asleep, grappling like “two cavewomen” — in a way that leaves the narrator stupefied. Having that kind of sex seems permanently outside her grasp, not destined to happen in this lifetime.

Then one day an unexpected payment arrives for 20 grand, and the narrator decides to blow it all on a trip to New York, where she’ll stay in a fancy hotel alone, see friends and art, and refill her creative well. She decides to drive cross-country to get there, prolonging the trip from one week to two, longer than she’s ever spent away from her kid. She seems poised to do something that will change her life, the kind of thing we expect to happen in New York, which is traditionally a great place to try on a new persona or have a meaningless affair. But, instead, she stops the car 30 miles outside of L.A. in a town called Monrovia, where she books a cheap motel room and begins a bizarre and magical interregnum.

There, she spends the whole 20 grand redecorating her motel room completely, redoing the wallpaper and lighting, transforming it into a perfect feminine oasis that smells like tonka bean. It’s in this pink-lit room where she begins a relationship with Davey, a man she meets in Monrovia, that’s as erotically charged as a teen romance — every accidental brush of skin makes both of them woozy with desire. Davey turns out to be a worshipful fan of the narrator’s work. He is also married, so they can’t have sex, which only makes their almost-sex hotter. When the narrator video-chats with Harris and her child, the fancied-up motel room helps her to maintain the fiction that she has finished driving cross-country and is now in New York.

It’s impossible to overemphasize how debilitatingly horny the narrator is during this period of the novel. When she isn’t with Davey, she does little but jerk off to fantasies of him that become increasingly baroque. “Often I rode him slowly for a very long time, like an old hunched man on an exhausted pony with a steady gait, riding and riding until I c-a-m-e,” July writes.

But in a twist, Davey isn’t even the first new person the narrator has sex with. Bereft after he definitively rejects physically consummating their relationship, she turns to an older woman named Audra, who also once had an affair with Davey. As the narrator masturbates while listening to Audra recount every detail of sex with Davey, she slowly realizes that Audra is masturbating, too. At first, she’s repulsed. Then, she’s aroused. What follows is the most bizarre yet simultaneously hot sex scene I have ever read. It has the swollen immediacy of user-generated erotic fan fiction, as if someone with Miranda July’s masterful control of tone was writing on literotica.com. “It was like breaking through the surface of the water after swimming blindly for fifteen years,” she thinks. Talk about body-rooted.

The new life she has been craving has now begun, albeit not in the way she’d wanted or expected. “I’d thought the two paths were: sex with Davey vs. a life of bitterness and regret. But maybe the road split between: a life spent longing vs. a life that was continually surprising.” She begins hormone replacement therapy, rubbing a bioidentical cream into her inner thigh and taking progesterone pills. She also starts training like an athlete in what sounds like a cross-fit gym, quickly transforming into someone who can take ass selfies with pride.

This transformation, like all transformations, has a stage where it’s messy and painful — the caterpillar in the chrysalis has to become goo prior to becoming a butterfly. When she confesses her infidelity to Harris, the moment is fraught: The terrifying possibility of divorce has been looming in her mind. But when he asks if it will happen again and she answers truthfully, he asks only for a reciprocal arrangement for himself.

From then on, she spends Wednesday nights in the motel room, and Harris spends Monday nights in his music studio. They decide to stop having a sexual relationship with each other. Instead, they’ll stay partners, co-living and co-parenting, and have sex with other people on their appointed days: “I could remain with him and our child in our house, as I really was.” In the blink of an eye, they both have girlfriends.

Memoirs about marital upheaval — Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath , Deborah Levy’s Real Estate , Leslie Jamison’s Splinters — tend to see their narrators divorced and punished. They suffer the loss of child custody, of community status, or their former homes. Even if a new life awaits on the other side of these books’ portrayals of midlife crises, that next chapter feels eked out, carved from the ruins of what came before, which must be deeply mourned. At the midpoint of All Fours, I expected some similar punishment to befall the narrator. But none of these things happen, or they don’t happen the way we’ve been conditioned to expect them to. For every micro-loss, the narrator gains something more valuable on the other side of her break with convention.

Is keeping only the good aspects of married family life and having an independent sexual and creative life something that can only happen in fiction? Is it too utopian to be believable? The book’s antic tone sometimes distracts from the story’s genuinely high stakes — July is never far from a joke, even in serious moments. The narrator wouldn’t be able to laugh at herself like this if what she was going through was actually super-painful, right? But in smaller moments and gestures, like when we see her obsessively packing five-part bento-box lunches for her kid, we glimpse real pain behind the character’s kooky defense mechanisms, as well as a desperate and futile attempt to cling to control that can only be abolished with a grand gesture like bifurcating her personal and domestic lives. We’re left with an abiding sense that the narrator has achieved, with no small amount of effort, something meaningful and necessary by building that magical motel room. It’s a place where she can visit with friends, masturbate, have sex, and be free of every domestic duty. Wednesdays are an escape from her real life, and also they make surviving her real life possible.

The last third of the book does hint that having your cake and eating it too is not without its discontents. When her new girlfriend dumps her, the narrator experiences the surreal weirdness of being at home with her husband and child while nursing a broken heart. A description of playing LEGOs with her child while coming to terms with her breakup gave me a pang of recognition; what parent can’t relate to having to conceal one’s inconvenient emotional meltdowns from a kid who just wants to show you the cool thing they’ve built in the corner of the living room? (“It’s wonderful, hon. So blocky,” she says.) And when the narrator tells her friends the new rules of her marriage, expecting at least some of them to follow through on their own avowed plans to jump ship, none of them are rushing to follow in her footsteps. “It was like we had all agreed to sneak into the haunted house together, but once inside, giggling and full of nerves, I looked back and discovered that I was alone. Everyone else had chickened out.” Turns out, not everyone’s definition of having a sanctuary of the self entails having a life partner you don’t fuck.

Virginia Woolf was 47 when she wrote that enduring line about a room of one’s own. The possibility of having a place that’s entirely yours, in which to be yourself completely, is this book’s most comforting and enduring fantasy. Women are told all the time to carve out space and time for themselves away from their partners and children, but no one ever comes out and says exactly how we’re supposed to pull that off. Reading about the motel-room solution had me searching Listings Project for studio spaces and pricing out what it would take to build my own meager version of that perfumed, pink-wallpapered sanctuary (too much, probably). But regardless of the specifics, Miranda July has given women in their 40s something totally new to want, plus permission to want it. Like all the best gifts, this one was entirely unexpected.

• miranda july
• relationships

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The Non-science Behind The New York Times Best Sellers List

H ave you read " Dragons Love Tacos "? If you haven't, where have you been? This delightful children's book has been on The New York Times Best Sellers list for more than seven years. Granted, it's in the Children's Picture Books category , but as of July 2, 2023, "Dragons Love Tacos" has spent more than 400 weeks on the list (or more than seven years); that's more time than almost any adult book except "The Road Less Traveled" and " The Glass Castle ."

Plus, just a couple decades ago, children and adult books were on the same list, until a teenage wizard necessitated the separation.

Whether the material is written for the young, old or anyone with an imagination, getting a book on any of The New York Times' Best Sellers lists is a boon for authors and publishers alike. It increases sales and prestige, and could make a film deal more of a possibility, Constance Grady wrote for Vox . Book covers, online listings and author websites make the most of being included, so what does it take to get there? It's complicated.

What Is The New York Times Best Sellers List?

The New York Times Best Sellers list is a series of weekly and monthly lists that do just what they sound like — recognize current top sellers. They are "compiled and archived by The Best Seller Lists Desk of The New York Times News Department, and are separate from the Editorial, Culture, Advertising and Business sides of The New York Times Company," according to the About the Best Sellers page of the Times' website. That means they are distinct from the Book Review or lists of recommendations like Best Books .

"The New York Times Best Seller lists consist of multiple categories, each measuring different sale types," a spokesperson for The New York Times said in an email interview.

Currently there are 11 weekly lists and seven monthly lists. New lists go live online Wednesdays at 7 p.m. EST. A portion of those lists appears in print 11 days later, due to the newspaper's printing schedule.

The weekly lists separate books into three categories: fiction, nonfiction and children's books. Fiction and nonfiction are further broken down into subcategories for hardcover, paperback, and combined print and digital sales. Nonfiction has an additional subcategory for how-to books. Children's books are divided into middle grade hardcover, picture books, series and young adult hardcover.

The monthly lists have more specialized categories like audio books, graphic books and manga, and mass market.

How Do Books Land on the NYT Best Sellers Lists?

Books are included on the list when they are best sellers; sounds simple, right?

"The lists are based on a detailed analysis of book sales from a wide range of retailers who provide us with specific and confidential context of their sales each week," according to the New York Times spokesperson. "These standards are applied consistently to provide Times readers our best assessment of what books are the most broadly popular in that time frame. Our methodology is published with the lists online and our goal is that the lists reflect authentic best sellers."

The gist of the methodology is that rankings reflect weekly sales reports from vendors or booksellers. For print books, that means chains, independent bookstores, online retailers, supermarkets, other types of bookstores and newsstands.

Digital sales come from online vendors of e-books for various e-reader formats. Most importantly, the sales data is reported to The Times by the vendors, and sales are defined as completed transactions by vendors and individual end-users.

Despite this explanation, some members of the publishing industry have raised questions about the methodology. "No one outside The New York Times knows exactly how its best sellers are calculated — and the list of theories is longer than the actual list of best sellers," Sophie Vershbow wrote in Esquire .

What Books Make the List?

As books are judged by the sales, not their literary value or other criteria, being on a NYT Best Sellers list is not an indication of a future Pulitzer Prize or another prestigious book award like the Booker Prize or the National Book Award . The Best Seller List is simply a numbers game that can give recognized authors and celebrities a leg up.

In the nonfiction category, some books are bound for the list, like "Spare" by Prince Harry or Michelle Obama's "The Light We Carry."

But debut novels from noncelebrity authors have a tougher time landing on the list. In 2021, for example, only five of the 15 debut novels on the hardcover fiction list were written by noncelebrity authors. And none of those five were endorsed by other celebrities or their book clubs, like Oprah's Book Club or the Good Morning America Book Club .

Likewise, well-known commercial fiction authors regularly appear on the list, so on any given week, you might notice the latest work by Nora Roberts, James Patterson or David Baldacci.

But there is plenty of room for others as books move in, out, up and down the lists. Even first-time authors show up with some regularity. Debuts by Jenny Jackson, Nita Prose, Sarah Penner, Chloe Gong and Robert Jones Jr. appeared in recent years.

The Longest-running Books on the Lists

You might think J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," the first book in the series, would be the longest-running best seller, and that would be a good guess; it has clocked in at 743 weeks as of the lists dated July 2, 2023 . But it is a close second to Jeff Kinney's "Diary of a Wimpy Kid," which has spent the most time on any New York Times Best-Seller list, appearing 744 times on the children's series list as of the same week.

As indicated by the wild success of "Harry Potter" and "Diary," the highest sales figures appear where kids' books are concerned. Consider the 401-week run of R. J. Palacio's "Wonder" on the middle grade list alongside "Dragons Love Tacos," 403 weeks on the picture book list.

Plenty of books rank as soon as they are published — the instant best sellers. Other books might take longer.

The fourth book in the Bridgerton romance novel series, "Romancing Mister Bridgerton," which was first published in 2002, had a strong showing on the best-seller lists after the popular series on Netflix was released in 2020.

The late Toni Morrison's searing debut novel, "The Bluest Eye," about a poor Black family in post-Depression 1940s Ohio, made the list when it was originally published in 1970. Though it resurfaced on the Paperback Trade Fiction list in 2020 and again in 2021.

How Some Authors Have Gamed the List

If the list is based solely on sales, can't publishers, authors and others (with the funds) simply buy up lots of their own books to get on the list and launch their works and maybe their careers?

The short answer is yes. It has happened numerous times , despite the ethical issues doing so raises. Vanity Fair reported in 2013 that Jacqueline Susann's "Valley of the Dolls"— which has sold more than 30 million copies since it was published in 1966 — got a major boost when Susann's husband Irving Mansfield got his hands on the names of 125 bookstores that The New York Times polled when compiling its best-seller list. He then spearheaded a book-buying campaign at those stores and sales skyrocketed.

Author Wayne Dyer bought 4,500 copies of his book "Your Erroneous Zones," "virtually the entire first printing," according to The Washington Post . In fact, there are agencies whose sole job is getting clients on the list.

The New York Times does not take such manipulations lightly. In a 2018 series, the Best Sellers List staff wrote a piece explaining its journalistic practices .

"We feel strongly that the best-seller lists should reflect the sale of books to individual end users. In other words, they should be sales to actual readers."

Since 1995, when a book with evident bulk purchases is included on a best sellers list, it appears with a dagger (†) to denote the skewed numbers.

Now That's Interesting The NYT lists rank books based on weekly sales rather than other factors, such as speed. Looked at from the standpoint of fast sales, Prince Harry's "Spare" ousted President Barack Obama's 2020 "A Promised Land" as the fastest-selling nonfiction book , and "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" holds the title of fastest-selling book overall, according to Guinness World Records .

Original article: The Non-science Behind The New York Times Best Sellers List

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Carolina hurricanes at new york rangers game 5 odds, picks and predictions, share this article.

The Carolina Hurricanes  and New York Rangers battle Monday in Game 5 of their Eastern Conference 2nd-round series. Puck drop from Madison Square Garden is scheduled for 7 p.m. ET (ESPN). Rangers lead series 3-1. Below, we analyze BetMGM Sportsbook’s lines around the Hurricanes vs. Rangers odds , and make our expert NHL picks and predictions.

The Hurricanes staved off elimination with a 4-3 victory in Game 4. Carolina not only survived, but it managed to notch a power-play goal from Brady Skjei at 16:49 of the 3rd period. The Hurricanes were 0-for-16 in the series on the man advantage before the former Rangers rearguard beat his former teammate Igor Shesterkin .

The Rangers suffered their 1st loss of the postseason after opening 7-0 in these playoffs. While New York built a 3-0 series lead, all 3 of those victories were by a single goal, and 2 of the games either went to overtime or double-overtime.

Stream the NHL all season on ESPN+ , with your team’s out-of-market games, exclusive games, originals and more. Get ESPN+ now!

Hurricanes at Rangers odds

Provided by BetMGM Sportsbook ; access USA TODAY Sports Scores and Sports Betting Odds hub for a full list. Lines last updated at 12:06 a.m. ET.

• Moneyline (ML) : Hurricanes -115 (bet $115 to win $100) | Rangers +105 (bet $100 to win $105)
• Puck line (PL)/Against the spread (ATS) : Hurricanes -1.5 (+200) | Rangers +1.5 (-250)
• Over/Under (O/U) : 5.5 (O: -105 | U: -115)

Hurricanes at Rangers projected goalies

Frederik Andersen (5-3-0, 2.63 GAA, .897 SV% – 2024 playoffs) vs. Igor Shesterkin (7-1-0, 2.25 GAA, .927 SV% – 2024 playoffs)

Andersen was back in the crease for Game 4 after Pyotr Kochetkov made the start in Game 3. Andersen has allowed 3 or more goals in each of his past 5 starts. He stopped 22 of 25 shots in Game 4 for his 1st victory since the series clincher in Game 5 against the New York Islanders.

Shesterkin allowed 4 goals for the 1st time in this postseason, and that came on 31 shots. He hadn’t allowed more than 3 goals in a single outing since March 26 against the Philadelphia Flyers during the regular season.

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Hurricanes at Rangers picks and predictions

Hurricanes 2, Rangers 1

The HURRICANES (-115) are road favorites in a game which they’re facing elimination. The Rangers (-105) were underdogs in the 1st 2 games at Madison Square Garden, and New York cashed in each of those outings.

While the Hurricanes dropped the 1st 2 visits to MSG in the postseason, Carolina is a high-octane offense which will be playing desperate hockey. It’s entirely possible Carolina plays its best game of the series, forcing the series back to Raleigh, only to lose in Game 6.

Puck line/Against the spread

The Rangers +1.5 (-250) will cost you 2 1/2 times your potential return, and that’s way too much risk for not enough reward. If you like New York to close out this series in 5 games, just bet it straight up.

The Underdog had won an amazing 12 consecutive meetings between these teams before the Hurricanes broke through as favorites in Game 4 on home ice.

UNDER 5.5 ( -115 ) is a strong play in Game 5, although the Over has dominated in this series so far, cashing in 3 of the 1st 4 games of the series.

Carolina is going to be pressing, but not taking a bunch of silly risks, as its back is against the wall. And New York won’t want any silly miscues to allow Carolina to have any life, and an ability to get back into the series. Go low, and feel confidently about doing so.

The windows are open, North Carolina! Online sports betting is LIVE! North Carolina sports betting |  North Carolina betting apps |  North Carolina sportsbook promos |  BetMGM North Carolina bonus code |  Caesars North Carolina promo code |  ESPN BET North Carolina promo |  bet365 North Carolina bonus code |  FanDuel North Carolina promo code |  DraftKings North Carolina promo code

For more sports betting picks and tips , check out SportsbookWire.com and BetFTW .

Follow Kevin J. Erickson on Twitter/X . Follow SportsbookWire on Twitter/X and like us on Facebook .

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