1942: Crux of War

By Jonathan Parshall

Oxford University Press, 2026

Take every quality of every conflict prior to it that your mind can conceive of, then begin multiplying, intensifying, widening, or deepening them, as the case may be. Next, stir in a host of new ingredients from radar to rocketry and the atomic bombs. Finally, reach for every superlative in your repertoire and apply them liberally – you’ll run out, but at this point you will start to have a decent picture of the Second World War.

It isn’t possible, in other words, to really get your arms around the subject. As a result, every historian has an angle, a remit, or a premise that guides them. Sometimes it’s Ian Toll expertly recounting the naval war between the United States and Japan, Rick Atkinson narrating the US Army’s role in liberating Europe, or Pritt Butar attempting (apparently) to write about everything that happened on the Eastern Front. In more revisionist ‘idea-based’ instances, we might read Sean McMeekin arguing that Stalin, not Hitler, was the driving force behind the war, or Phillips Payson O’Brien reasoning that “there were no decisive battles in World War II” and instead focusing on the theater sized “super-battlefields” of the air and sea.

Adding to the immense literature of this colossal war is Jonathan Parshall’s new and exactingly titled 1942: Crux of War, which seems to try to scale itself to the subject, right down to its physical construction. It is a non-standard sized hardcover clocking in shy of 1300 pages, chalked with rich maps and visuals, a deep bibliography in which he cites all the ‘right’ people (Glantz & House on Stalingrad, Richard Frank on Guadalcanal, Mark Harrison on economics, and so on), and peppered full of lively and knowing notes (sometimes just the former, when Parshall first cites Clausewitz, his footnote hilariously reads: “Drink! For it is written that all serious students of military history shall raise glasses when the name of the great Prussian military thinker is invoked”).

Parshall argues that 1942, with the U.S. having entered the war in December 1941, was “the critical year of World War II, and its tipping point.” Specifically, it “was the only year either side could have shaped a course to ultimate victory.” So concatenated to the facts of this crucial year itself, Parshall is giving his theory of the case, of the war as a whole. The drumbeat of that case comes down to a word: contingency.

Parshall effectively situates his approach between books “. . .purporting to describe the critical battle or turning point in this or that theater of the Second World War,” and conceptually novel (Sean McMeekin, Phillips Payson O’Brien) and deterministic accounts (Paul Kennedy): “The moral of the story is that the outcome of this global conflict, at least during 1942, was contingent on hundreds of events and on the gradual improvement of Allied military performance.”

He simultaneously draws on these accounts, and gently pushes against them, by narratively taking the year globally and month-by-month while answering an array of outlined fundamental questions, “the answers to which, cumulatively, compose the answer to the most important matter of all: who was going to win this war?”  That is to say, he gives battles like Guadalcanal and Stalingrad their due, in authorly zest and page dedication, while not assigning them war-changing status; likewise, he marvelously details the practical and administrative nuts-and-bolts of war economy and engagingly illustrates the personalities and consequences of commanders at war, while equally denying them any sort of monocausality: “The Allies couldn’t win the war by virtue of their larger wallets alone. They had to fight, and fight well, when things looked really bleak.”

Still, it must be said, a principal impression of this book is that given a certain level of military competence, organization and economics were the rub of the war - and here it was not an equal fight. The punch-drunk Axis Powers were running on fumes from the start:

Despite Goebbels’s successful propaganda efforts to portray the Reich as an industrial and military juggernaut, Germany was in no way positioned for a sustained effort when war broke out in 1939, because it was already living hand to mouth. The only reason Germany had subsequently been able to undertake BARBAROSSA was because of the haul of war booty, trucks, and petroleum that it had captured after its campaign against France.

And then in 1942 we see that “Deep in America’s heartland, and behind the shield of the Urals, the armories that would pound the Reich to rubble were already being put in place.” Furthermore, as he understates the point, “it certainly didn’t hurt to have their [the Allies] war effort underwritten by the hefty bank account of the world’s richest nation.”

In short (perhaps an inappropriate phrase for this behemoth book), the arc of 1942 has a definite form: 1941 ends and 1942 begins with the Axis Powers malevolently and freely stomping over their theaters of operations, from Russia and North Africa to Southeast Asia and the Pacific; as the year progressed, the “foundational bankruptcy” of Axis strategy began to show and they could only hope their “excellence on the operational level” would compensate; by the end of 1942, as Parshall masterfully demonstrates, they had “failed most of their crucial tests” while “the Allies had passed most of their own.” Finally, looking ahead, the brute result of the morbid drama of the year was that “After 1942, the Allies would never ultimately be denied in any theater.”

This book, of course, is not so businesslike in its exposition. Incessantly informative at every level and rendered in sprightly idiomatic prose - where which German attacks hit like a “spring-loaded cement block to the face” and American “soldiers and sailors” are “greener than St. Paddy’s Day” - Parshall’s communicable love for the subject will, at its heights, have even veterans of the subject bouncing in their easy chairs (see The Naval Battle of Guadalcanal) – and, in the end, left deeply impressed.

In his generally forgotten history of the Second World War, Francis Trevelyan Miller described the event as “the greatest story in the annals of mankind.” It is a story that affronts comprehensiveness and requires simplification, but goads authors to set fire their pen and write history worthy of it. With 1942: The Crux of War, Johnathan Parshall has delivered and raised a banner title of Second World War literature.

David Murphy holds a Masters of Finance from the University of Minnesota.

Country People

By Daniel Mason

Random House, 2026

Literary critics are fraud investigators.  Our jobs are complicated because what we investigate are admitted frauds—fictions and poems.  We are on the lookout for what can be called secondary fraudulent activity, works that are not what they pretend to be.  Zadie Smith’s novel The Fraud?  A historical novel pretty much innocent of unnecessary fictionalizing.  I looked into Daniel Mason’s novel Country People for admittedly personal reasons.  It was described in glowing reviews as about college life in a small Vermont town.  I grew up in Calvin Coolidge’s home hamlet Plymouth, worked in the woods and on roads with old Green Mountain Boys (probably called “hillbillies” in West Virginia), and even taught at a college in little Northfield, Vermont.  By the way, reviewers can be fraudulence accomplices, sharing the fraud’s desire to please readers.  Another by the way: we fraud investigators take no pleasure in our work; we serve to protect you, the literary consumers.

Country People is called a novel, but really it’s a tale like the anything-can-happen Russian folk tales that the 44-year-old protagonist collects, writes about, and adapts for bedtime stories he tells his two children.  Mason mentions Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief.” It’s necessary to appreciate tall or small tales, but try as I might the further this tale went on the more my suspenders stretched out and I began to feel manipulated. 

I resented Mason’s bait and switch.  Country People does begin like a novel, an academic novel, the visiting professor subset that David Lodge made popular years ago.  A brilliant Milton scholar and her husband, who has spent 14 years not writing his Ph.D. dissertation, and their two primary school children leave the familiar world of Silicon Valley so the professor can teach at Greensbury College in southern Vermont.  Not to be confused with Middlebury College or Bennington College or any other factual locations, for all are invented.  The investigator had just a flicker of suspicion.  Reportedly someone who escaped COVID in New England, Daniel Mason may have never lived in Vermont.

I almost forgot the lovable dog, described as a member of the family who gets about as much space in the book as the two children.  Homeless people know the appeal of having a dog lying next to their signs.  The son seems to have escaped from one of Richard Powers’ novels about child prodigies.  The younger girl becomes a remarkably skilled skier.  Their father Miles is a familiar figure in college novels, a good parent but socially inept and an incurable procrastinator.   Arriving in the summer, the family loves Vermont, even though their rented house is full of rats.  They also have minor problems with small-town food and men who can talk only about lawnmowers.  But Miles eventually takes unlikely pleasure in learning how to use a scythe from another husband accompanying a wife teaching at the college.  In the winter, Miles takes unlikely joy in learning how to cross-country ski from a Norwegian import.

The tale is not outrageous, but where are the promised “country people”?  I know Vermont has been overrun by foliage fanatics and snow-sliders, what natives call “down-country folks.”  But given Mason’s title, I was led to expect some Vermont-born characters I’d call “country people,” someone like Josiah Coolidge, Cal’s cousin who tended the Plymouth dump, or Josiah’s son Warren, who, dressed in coat and tie, sold Christmas cards door to door in the summer.  Given the novel’s plethora of recent arrivals and part-time residents, and the cliches that could have been plucked from Vermont Life, I had difficulty suspending my belief that Mason’s story could have been set just about anywhere.

Anywhere with snow, because it’s in a long winter chapter that my suspension failed and my investigation activated.  Maybe Country People wasn’t a tale but a self-referring fantasy.  When Miles is injured while skiing, he meets in the local emergency room a man who uses a disability scooter and gives Miles a ride home—and then spends three nights snowbound with the family.  The man is a Black autodidact who has an old library card catalogue in his repurposed ambulance.  He collects hundreds of index cards about follies, wacky ideas, crazy theories, and persistent fraudulences, all about as fantastically unlikely as he is.  Around 1.5% of the population of Vermont is Black, so this small-town savior is quite a fortunate find or DEI discovery for Mason.  Except for his race, the man could also be a character in the Russian tale “The Blind Man and the Cripple.”

After this meta chapter on fraudulence, Mason’s tale becomes even taller or the fantasy becomes even more fantastic when Miles attends a secret coven—composed of both Vermonters and aliens—of people (including his savior) who believe in a “hollow earth” beneath the rocky ground.  Mason has made up a source and text for this belief, Jeremiah Wylkes’ Colloquies.  Maybe if Mason, like his wife, had finished his dissertation and taught in a literature department, he’d have known an American fraudster named Poe had been there first with “holes at the poles” references in his tales.  We get the names and occupations of Wylkesians but not enough to judge if they are country people.

My distrust of Mason increased when I discovered the novelist was a psychiatrist who taught at Stanford, not some starving artist in a Brooklyn or Oakland warren who is trying to make some easy money from an easy fantasy. Of course, a psychiatrist is free to make up tales or fantasies (though he might not want his patients to do so).  But wouldn’t a psychiatrist have more serious things to do?  Couldn’t he be expected to be interested in what real undereducated individual country folk were depressed by—such as woolen mills closing, family dairies losing to Big Milk, old folks putting their “antique” junk out on their lawns to sell, once proudly independent Vermonters becoming—like him the tale-teller—participants in the entertainment industry, selling farms to become building lots for second homes, cleaning rooms at ski resorts, moving into garages to become AirBNB hosts?  About the author, the investigator can only ask questions, not bring charges. 

If anything, Mason appears to mock the natives’ problems by including “transcripts” of a radio talk show where people call in to the host and his “expert guest” for practical help.  In Mason’s book, these transcripts are about the only elements that didn’t require suspension of disbelief, but the transcripts don’t address the alienation many individual Vermonters feel from their old way of life before their state became a “Winter Wonderland” for others.  Yet another, possibly relevant by the way: the investigator no longer lives in Vermont and didn’t vote for Vermont’s immigrant truth teller Bernie Sanders.

Only occasionally entertained by Mason’s casually solicitous style and burbling congeniality, I kept waiting for something I might call real or, at least, realistic, something like the sharp wit and dangerous comedy of Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People.”  Even a psychiatrist using “country people” as his title must know that story, where a soft-soaping Bible salesman seduces an educated woman and ends with the salesman running off with her wooden leg.  Country People has several happy endings covering everyone and the dog.  They weren’t promised but were expected and delivered.

O’Connor’s story of local color fraudulence actually applies to both Mason’s readers and to Vermonters.  Reviewers and then, presumably, readers may be seduced and pleased by his entertainment.  Vermonters were seduced by the promise of dollars that entertaining tourists could bring to the state.  Mason’s tale could be harmless; it cost me just thirty bucks.  The country people of Vermont are seeing a much higher cost: the destruction of their local culture.  Vermont was once a republic, then a state, now a playground.

Tom LeClair is the author of eight novels, one of which, Passing Away, is about cultural change in Vermont.

The Living Realm

By Jordan Tannahill

Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2026

A horrible searing drought is afflicting Berlin in Jordan Tannahill’s new novel, The Living Realm, scorching the grass and cracking the ground, all except Teufelssee, a glacial lake deep in the Grunewald forest whose waters stay every bit as cool and refreshing. Those waters attract overheated bathers, various nudists, and an assortment of gay men seeking anonymous pleasure regardless of meteorological conditions. It’s a place that attracts the narrator of Tannahill’s story, along with his friends, Birgit and Gabor, for innocent outings.

Our narrator (he doesn’t have a name, which is economical since he doesn’t have a personality either, but he’s an archeology postdoc from Cambridge) originally came to Berlin years ago at the behest of Birgit, who set him up in an archeology program at Freie Universität, straightened out his visa, and even found him his first apartment. He and Birgit and Gabor (a former elementary schoolmate of Victor Orban, obviously in self-imposed exile from Hungary) take to spending time in the woods around Teufelssee to cool off.

But things cool considerably for our narrator when he spots a man in the forest who’s an exact double for one of his long-lost lovers. It’s more than mere similarity; he’s certain it actually is Lukas, somehow transposed to the way he looked thirty years ago at his physical prime, and naturally, the vision haunts him.

He’s not overly alarmed, because he knows he’s a character in a novel. And since Birgit and Gabor likewise realize they’re supporting characters in a novel, they suggest he seek psychiatric help, but they’re not insistent about it, even when their friend starts seeing other old lovers in the forest. Even the ghost lovers seem to be wondering who’ll play them in the Hollywood adaptation.

Since Tannahill is also a playwright, the main problem with his book will be very familiar to him: that deadly second act. Once our narrator has started seeing old lovers in the forest, once those visions have no real effect on either him or anybody else, once it all starts to seem like a mere trick of the omnipresent heat (or, as distantly and whimsically suggested at one point, maybe leftover Chernobyl radiation – after all, if it can irradiate hogs, might it not resurrect hotties?), well, then what?

Tannahill’s answer, lieber Gott, is … municipal history, page after page of it, as our narrator learns the extremely detailed history of Berlin, Teufelssee, gayness, and being gay in Teufelssee in Berlin. The book is chary of paragraph breaks as it is, but that’s only made worse by frequent passages like this:

As Maes explained it, in 1134, a great storm broke through the Flemish coast and carved a fifteen-kilometer tidal inlet that, through another channel, suddenly offered sea access to the formerly inland city of Bruges, and caused the city to rise in prominence as one of the foremost centers of European trade. But this new waterway and economic lifeline, named the Zwin, began to fill with silt from the late thirteenth century onward, and by 1500 it had grown so shallow as to render it unusable, cutting off Bruges again from the sea. As merchants shifted their business activities to nearby Antwerp, Bruges stagnated, and it was during this time of economic decline and hardship, when scapegoats were sorely needed, that an explosion of sodomy cases were brought forward and prosecuted by municipal authorities. In the public records, Maes had found a marked increase in sodomy trials, convictions, and public burnings in the Grote Markt between the years 1450 and 1525.

In non-professional circles, this is what’s known as padding, and The Living Realm has more of it than a furniture showroom. This is a dead giveaway that a novel should have been a short story, and it’s hardly saved by our narrator’s eventual inner crisis, when he decides to surrender himself to whatever the heck is going on in the woods:

As much as I could grasp, I understood that there was a force that dwelled within the Teufelssee so vast, so heavy and ancient, it bent the very fabric of reality around it, bent desires, lives, and lured us to our destruction, to the very making and unmaking of meaning … I would walk deep into the darkness, as deep as it took, and I would present myself to Teufelssee, and I would demand from the shadows that they appear.

It turns out he’s not that demanding, and by the time a cute little plot twist happens in the Teufelssee late in the book, even the ghosts seem to have lost interest.

Beyond Beauty: A Portrait of John Singer Sargent

By Devon Cox

WW Norton 2026

Devon Cox visited hundreds of archives and scrutinized heaps of primary records in preparation for his new book Beyond Beauty: A Portrait of John Singer Sargent (readers will largely have to take his word for it, since the book inexcusably includes no bibliography). Sargent is described by him as the premiere artist of the Gilded Age, and what Cox found after all this research was something of a revelation:

From this reappraisal, a more complex and nuanced version of him soon began to emerge from the shadow of history. The stolid, severe, two-dimensional man was replaced with a sensitive, cerebral, flesh-and-blood man, an ambitious, wickedly funny, occasionally mischievous, modern aesthete and outsider with an insatiable curiosity, irrevocably drawn to the ‘bizarre and outlandish’ with an ‘unavowed love of rare kinds of beauty’ and for ‘incredible types of elegance,’ a man with a daring rebel spirit and antiestablishment sentiments, who harboured a fascination for criminology and the underworld; a man preoccupied with sin and salvation, who even as a child reading Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, found sympathy with the great rebel Satan, whom he considered an ‘altogether different character from what we sinners imagine.’

Quite apart from the occasionally appalling prose and whimsical punctuation, this may be the standing world’s record for the largest number of euphemisms crammed into a single paragraph of normal length. What Cox means is: Sargent was gay. Sargent might have taken pains to obscure that fact when painting socialite swells in Boston (although he was considerably less careful when cruising the demimonde of Venice), but it was never an impenetrable obscurity (the lascivious nudes of young men being something of a giveaway), and it would be a stretch to characterize it as an overriding categorization. But at least it underpins the freshness of Cox’s account, which is more up-to-date than Stanley Olsen’s life from a quarter-century ago and more energetic than Paul Fisher’s account of the painter from 2022.

The writing doesn’t get much better throughout, alas. When he’s writing about Sargent’s art world debut in 1880 at Boston’s St. Botolph Club, for instance, Cox seems actually anxious to work in as many cliches as possible:

It was the perfect venue for Sargent to stage his first solo exhibition. He needed to make a splash to draw the attention of wealthy and fashionable Bostonians, who would be his prospective patrons. He pulled out all the stops and diligently cherry-picked his very best work to showcase his broad talent.

But mostly, this life of Sargent is less concerned with wine and roses and more with whine and poses. Once Sargent’s brilliant society portraits made his professional repute and began floating a thoroughly comfortable lifestyle, he began complaining about those portraits and denigrating them as rote soulless exercises, burdensome obligations he undertook with maximum eye-rolling. Throughout the latter half of the book, these portraits are unflatteringly contrasted with the more impressionistic work he did on his own initiative. “For Sargent,” writes Cox, “the watercolours were intended to ‘keep up my morale’ and ‘console me from the rotten stuff I am doing.’” The prospect of trudging back to portraiture work was, Cox writes, “a nightmare.”

Sargent managed to complain even about commissioned work that had nothing to do with painting flattering portraits of Lord and Lady So-and-So, constantly griping about “the damned picture that is expected of me,” regardless of what the damned picture in question happened to be. When living in a gorgeous suite of rooms at Boston’s legendary Copley Plaza, he moans about the “dreary regularity” of his sumptuous catered meals and laments the prospect of spending a summer in “this empty town.”  It’s a portrait of the artist as insufferable kvetch.

Even so, it’s all undeniably entertaining. Sargent’s portraits stand in their vibrant, chatty beauty well apart from the pampered little popinjay who produced them, and the fact that a distinctly different Sargent emerges from each new biography is an amusement so fitting for a portrait painter that it almost feels contrived.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

Mahalia Jackson: Moving On Up a Little Higher:

The Story of an American Civil Rights Pioneer

By Timothy B. Tyson & Mary D. Williams

Liveright 2026

Mahalia Jackson: Moving On Up a Little Higher, a collaboration between civil rights historian Mary Williams and bestselling writer Timothy Tyson (author of 2017’s excellent The Blood of Emmett Till), highlights the great New Orleans-born gospel singer not primarily as an international recording sensation but as a Civil Rights advocate, singing and enthusing crowds at Birmingham and Selma and lending her burgeoning stardom to the cause.

It's a fascinating look at a figure who’s now known exclusively for her music. Although this isn’t a full-dress biography, it’s nonetheless a comprehensive reflection on a handful of some of the most important elements of her life: her faith, her music, and her very active social consciousness. Jackson the superstar repeatedly cedes the spotlight to Jackson the black woman living in the shadow of Jim Crow. She tells her friend Studs Terkel:

When I’m on stage and television working with white people … they just come up to me and hug me and love me, and say I am so wonderful. But when I am walking down the street like an ordinary person, they don’t recognize me. When I go into a department store in the South, I can’t get a sandwich, I can’t get a bottle of pop, I can’t even get a cab, and I am just the same Mahalia Jackson that they just got through saying how wonderful I am.

And the authors repeatedly reiterate it: “Mahalia longed for an America where she could walk down the street and be respected just like any other American citizen,” they write. “She wanted to be able to travel across the country without worrying if she could get a hotel room or eat at a restaurant.” Jackson is quoted as experiencing a dull pain in her gut at the thought that one of her musical tours will now travel to the American South. “Everything is fine, as long as I am singing,” she says. “But as soon as I walk off that stage, I’m just another colored person. Where can I stay that night? What motel will give me a room? Where can I find a place that will serve me food?”

As the authors point out, politics were intimately connected with gospel music from its origins in the “hard history of slavery and oppression,” and therefore Jackson’s faith and politics “mirrored one another with near precision.” “One thing that tied her faith and her politics,” they write, “is that she acted on both, often in the same motion.”

The book’s narrative can sometimes be oddly evangelical on the matter of Jackson’s faith. The text under a photo of her performing at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival, for instance, ecstatically reads: “As always, she did not merely perform, but opened her sails to the Spirit and let the wind carry her to wherever God wanted her to go” (in fact, she merely performed, unless Williams and Tyson would like to provide additional photos showing this singer-carrying “spirit”) – but the passion of Jackson’s beliefs, religious, social, and political, are more visible in these pages than in any previous work about this fascinating figure. And if it sends younger readers out to find her music, so much the better.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

The Enigma Challenge

By SC Godfrey

Viking 2026

Cryptology, those of us who find it boring rather than fascinating are constantly told by those who find it fascinating, is not boring. Certainly this must be the position of Zoe Wilder, the main character in SC Godfrey’s debut thriller The Enigma Challenge, since she’s gone into the field professionally, as a postdoc at the small private Chessmont University specializing in decoding ciphers; as she helpfully puts it, “God, I love a puzzle.”

 Zoe is visiting Madrid with her postdoc boss (and, just this minute, ex-boyfriend) Eric, where she’ll present a paper at the International Conference on Cryptology, and Eric has warned her sternly, as the novel’s opening note, that no matter what she does, she must not enter the infamous Enigma Challenge. It’s dangerous, he tells her, and people get hurt.

While he’s at it, Eric has another warning for Zoe: by all means steer clear of an American named Dane Seaver, since he’s guilty of a long litany of academic misdemeanors and is generally bad news.

This is on Page 4. Any guesses who turns out to be “obscenely handsome” on Page 19?

“He’s handsome in profile, lean, with a muscled chest and arms,” Zoe is soon in a perfect position to observe. “His black hair is short, and the side of his face has gorgeous contour.” At this point we still don’t have any idea what Zoe herself looks like, or her personality beyond loving puzzles, or what she saw in schlubby Eric, or what he saw in her. It’s almost as though she’s some kind of cipher.

Zoe presents her paper in due course, and even in the blunted precis given to readers, it’s fairly deadly:

I start with a general overview of cipher types: Caesar, Patristocrat, pigpen, homophonic, polyalphabetic, columnar transportation, and abbreviation. I present case studies on the Playfair cryptogram used by Dorothy L. Sayers in her 1932 crime novel, Have His Carcase, Rudyard Kipling’s Patristocrat puzzle from his 1902 Just So Stories, and a 1957 text that makes the intriguing, if unlikely, argument that Francis Bacon wrote William Shakespeare’s plays, based on a number of ciphers in the works. I notice people jotting notes and nodding along, which I take as a good sign.

Those poor saps in the audience might be nodding along, but readers of this slog of a novel are far more likely to be nodding off. Zoe (later on in the book, characters get chummy with her and shorten that to “Zo,” even though this doesn’t shorten anything and is the exact same pronunciation effort, like shortening “Joe” to “Jo”) immediately ignores all of Eric’s advice. She enters the Enigma Challenge because it would be damn odd in a book called The Enigma Challenge if she didn’t, and what with all that obscene handsomeness flying around, it would also be strange if she didn’t fall in with Dane Seaver, so she promptly does.

We learn more about the Challenge itself, including some of its potentially deadly consequences in the event of failure, and the narrative immediately jets off to half a dozen exotic locations as the stakes of the Challenge grow steeper. Once again, since she knows she’s a character in a novel and is naturally hoping to be in a movie based on a novel, Zoe obligingly describes her own basic character arc: “I’ve been sitting in front of computer screens for the past ten years, studying,” she tells dreamy Dane. “My nose was buried in texts. I’ve seen and done more in the past two days than I have in ten years.”

The cryptological adventures continue right to the end of the book, but they don’t happen at anything like the pace that’s needed in order to make the thing work. Zoe and Dane never have even a drop of chemistry; all the characters talk in cliches, the exotic locales are listlessly evoked, and, most crucially, the actual process of cryptology, which inevitably becomes central to the plot’s payoff, is never made the least bit interesting, much less exciting.

The cliffhanger ending is well-orchestrated, but the Berlin Philharmonic couldn’t orchestrate its way out of this murk.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything

By Kathryn Jezer-Morton

Viking 2026

For her nonfiction debut, The Cut columnist Kathryn Jezer-Morton takes as her central subject what she aptly calls “the perverse incentive structure of the social web” and the way that incentive structure has altered not only the way we understand the stories of others but also of how we shape our own stories. She consults a nice manageable number of sources and a small mountain of anecdotes in order to set up a series of contemplative questions to which every single one of her readers already knows the answers.

Inevitably, the book is about branding. Social media addiction has subtly, ineluctably taught millions of people to think of themselves as both snake oil peddlers and the snake oil itself, to create a kind of personal shale layer between their offline and online selves. In addition, obviously, to making all polls about every conceivable subject completely unreliable, since nobody is only one self anymore, this shift steadily eats away at the offline, which is to say non-monetized, self. The brand becomes everything; the actual self simply vanishes.

On some level, every social media addict knows about this horrifying process, and they’re all in this author’s sites when she brings out questions like “Is whatever competitive edge that you might gain from having honed a compelling personal brand worth the cost of your sense of self?” If asked, every single social media addict would promptly answer that question with a forthright “no.” But it would be meaningless, since it would be the offline self who’d be saying that, not the online self. The online self aggressively, mindlessly pursues that competitive edge, and the online self is running the show.

Jezer-Morton seems regularly aware of this. “Narrating vulnerability on social media is bound by just as many social rules as any other kind of narration,” she writes, “and all share the same common denominator: The brand must remain strong.”

Consistently, she stresses that this subject is a two-way process. As much as people use social media, it’s using them just as much. “Most of us are accustomed to the notion that social platforms are built for the maximization of profit, and that our idle moments of scrolling are ruled by algorithms that serve this market,” she writes. “What we’re perhaps less aware of is the extent to which we’ve internalized the algorithm’s rules in our own posting habits.” Any random foray on social media will confirm this; people self-censor, misrepresent, and outright lie as routinely as breathing, all in the service of shaping and maintaining an alternate version of themselves.

A monetized version, it should be repeated, even if the monetization is less than nominal and may never materialize. The allure of that extra $10 a year has an unholy strength that nobody in the pre-social media would could have guessed, and the strength of it has been incrementally built and encouraged by the makers of social media with more intensity as the years go on and the shareholder greed deepens apparently unlimitedly. “It’s not a coincidence,” Jezer-Morton writes, “that the years when social media still felt fun and freewheeling were also the years when the companies behind the apps weren’t expected to make money.”

As noted, there’s virtually nothing in The Story of Your Life that will come as any kind of astounding revelation to its presumed audience, the people who know social media quite well and spend far more energy on it than their offline selves would believe or their online selves would admit. But the energetic presentation of all this bad news in such lively prose serves a reminding purpose nevertheless.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

Up on Cove Mountain: Adventure, Tragedy, and a Quest for Meaning on the Appalachian Trail

By Earl Swift

Mariner 2026

“As a rule,” writes Earl Swift in his new book Up on Cove Mountain, “we venture into the wilds to escape civilization – its comforts and conveniences, its traffic, its smells and bustle and clatter.” This is both the essential truth and the essential irony of the book, which is braided with both an exuberant, eloquent evocation of the wilderness and a slow, piecemeal account of a horrific murder that happened in the wilderness in 1990.

The wilderness in question here is the fabled Appalachian Trail, which runs from Maine to Georgia and attracts millions of hikers every year. During each of those years, some few thousand of those many millions are “through-hikers,” people who are attempting to hike the entire trail rather than just smaller, easier chunks. As Swift notes, plenty of people who hike the AT do so in the firm expectation of a kitchen-cooked meal and their own bed that same night.

Swift through-hiked the trail in 1990 and imagined doing it again in 2024 as a challenge on at least a couple of levels: not only does the weight of 35 years add strain to the already-demanding process of a through-hike, but revisiting the trail would mean revisiting the tragedy that happened there back in 1990 when two popular, well-liked hikers, Molly Larue and Geoffrey Hood, were brutally murdered during their own through-hike by an escaped criminal who’d been observing the pair closely before he struck. Swift notes that back in 1990, he’d been clueless, careless, and inexperienced. “I struggled to understand why fate chose them,” he writes, “when I made a far fatter target.”

He'll eventually have an answer to that kind of question, but first the book unfolds in a succession of camping horror stories, friendships made and maintained, and loving nature descriptions, all the familiar fare of Bill Bryson’s bestselling 1998 book A Walk in the Woods, only here rendered with more literary skill and, necessarily, far fewer cheap laughs. And given the grim half of his narrative, Swift apparently feels compelled to reassure his readers that violence of any sort on the AT is “vanishingly rare.” “Three to four million people stepped onto the footpath in the course of a typical year, according to the trail’s stewards, and precious few of them encountered any trouble from others,” he writes. “Over the preceding century, crime on the trail has claimed five lives.”

Even considering only those cases where crime has definitely been concluded (ruling out for the time being, in other words, all the disappearances or questionable outcomes), this number, five in a century, is flatly absurd, but its inclusion is understandable: despite gradually revealing the terrible story of what happened to Larue and Hood, he’s still trying to write an encouraging book about second chances and personal challenges. And his descriptions of those personal challenges will be starkly familiar to anybody of a certain age who’s ever attempted even a partial hike: “I’m carrying five days of food, two liters of water, and a full array of winter gear in anticipation of colder nights ahead,” Swift writes. “Every ounce asserts itself as I chug up the steeply graded path – in my hips, my quads, my shoulders, and in my breathing, which soon quicks to shallow gasps.”

Whenever the narrative returns to the tragedy of 1990, it raises the same questions about random chance and the unpredictability of most violence out in the wild world. You sit on a log to eat your lunch, the whole time unknowingly sharing the space with a six-foot rattlesnake who complacently ignores you but bites the next person who sits on that same log; you enter a sunlit meadow on a beautiful day and surprise a doe with a beautiful fawn, and the next day somebody enters that same meadow and surprises a mother grizzly with two cubs.

In the end, Swift simply decides it comes down to dumb luck:

Sometimes you get lucky. No reason for it – you just get lucky. Other times, fate works against you. It doesn’t mean you’re blessed and it doesn’t mean you’re damned. It just means you’re vulnerable to the whims of chance.

This might not be particularly comforting to readers who are contemplating an attempt on the AT, but it’s undeniable. And readers who are content to trek the trail from the comfort of their reading chairs will get more of the experience, good and bad, ugly and beautiful, than any book has conveyed in many years.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

Cool Machine

By Colson Whitehead

Doubleday, 2026

If you enjoyed Whitehead’s first two crime novels in his Harlem trilogy—Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto—you’ll probably want to read Cool Machine.  But I wouldn’t recommend starting with it even though critics (other critics) are in full rave mode about it.  If you do insist on beginning with Cool Machine, I can say that Whitehead strokes enough old information into the new novel so that it can stand alone.  Actually, that should be “move alone” because Whitehead has upped the action quotient, replacing much of the charm of his up-from-nothing Black striver Ray Carney selling furniture to the middle class and into middle age with cinematic action and gouts of violent harm. 

When I reviewed Crook Manifesto in these pages, I asked what would Toni Morrison have thought of double Pulitzer winner Whitehead’s shift from literary novelist to purveyor of local-color historical entertainments.  In Cool Machine Whitehead seems rather defensive about his switch to genre fictions.  Carney wonders, “Could crime be art?”—and answers himself: “If you were really good at it.”  In “City at Night,” the first story in the trilogy’s usual set of three, Carney has long talks with “Uncle Rich,” a criminal mastermind back from his faked death to commit a complicated heist at the Waldorf Astoria that he says he will do “`For my art.’”  Carney listens to the artistic thief because Carney has become an active (and unlikely) member of Uncle Rich’s crew.  Too much of the story resembles Ocean’s Eleven material that requires tedious pages of Uncle Rich describing the elaborate set-up, the exposition before what he insists on calling the “execution.”  Turns out that Rich is not just a “genius” artist but also a moralist, doing the Waldorf job to rescue Jesse Owens’ Olympic gold medal from rich white folks.  The heist is clever but maybe not art.

In the second story, “Here Comes Sue Simmons,” the longest of the trio, the reflective Carney gives way to Pepper, the laconic and violent “muscle” who has helped Carney the fence out of previous scrapes.  Now Pepper is an improbable jackleg detective assisting a group of well-intentioned thieves trying to steal back and then return to Africa looted art, in this case a Ngil mask.  Pepper is old, slow of mind and slow afoot, but is still capable of movie moves that he needs to take out a much younger hit man (the first of two hit men in Cool Machine). This cool killer (called the “Melancholy Hitman”) thinks like an artist who occasionally likes to abandon his severe discipline and experiment with something “Flashy, flamboyant,” such as a defenestration.  As in an action movie, Pepper has a final mano-a-mano face-off with the hitman (who cut off an earlier thief’s face).  Pepper, down for the count—what will Carney do without him?—manages to gouge out the hitman’s eyes and recover the mask.  This is not a spoiler because, given the conventional movement of Whitehead’s stories, the reader knows how it will end.

Carney returns in “No Radio,” and seems to have been influenced by the altruistic motives of Uncle Rich and Pepper.  Decades ago, Carney failed to save the life of his ineffectual criminal cousin.  Now Carney gets a second chance with that cousin’s son who is in trouble with the police and the Mafia—and is pursued by yet another hit man called “Rabbit.”  Actual crime stories—the ones that get told at trial—often don’t have happy endings, but all three of Whitehead’s do, this last one a complete surprise to Carney and the reader.

“Art was a racket like everything else,” Pepper thinks, Whitehead implies.  The mastermind “crafted the story [of a heist] to appeal to all quarters.”  Carney makes money selling goods (stolen merchandise and the furniture) that his customers want.  Whitehead seems to have learned from his consumer-conscious crooks.  Only in the second story does he have a lawbreaker who disturbs his audience (and maybe some readers) with enigmatic political graffiti that may remind readers of Whitehead’s earlier literary novels. The tagger is even more altruistic than the other criminals because he is making nothing from his messages.  Carney is called the “cool machine” but a more appropriate title for the book named for him—if William Burroughs hadn’t already used it—would be “Soft Machine.” While increasing the violence in this finale, Whitehead has also turned up the sentimentality with characters like those old proverbial (and movie) prostitutes with hearts of gold.  In the final story, $200,000 worth.

In Cool Machine, a wacked-out moviemaker named “Zippo” returns from Crook Manifesto with moral purpose—to undermine the then popular movie The Gods Must Be Crazy because of its racism and colonialism.   An ethical artist like Zippo might want to film Cool Machine because it has the justice-delivering third act of feel-good crime movies.  Maybe Cool Machine is not exactly One Battle After Another but is still critical of the racism and corruption in America that drive some little guys to criminality. 

What remains in Cool Machine despite all the violence and good will is some of the earlier novels’ historical background—the streets and shops and idiosyncratic street people Carney knew so well.  But with the aging of Carney and Pepper, the old places and times often become sources of nostalgia, more sentiment.  The downtown political corruption and exploitation of uptown Blacks continue, but Whitehead has his characters’ attentions focused elsewhere, on playing out dramatic plots or righting cultural wrongs.

What also remains are passages of Whitehead’s casually witty and sometimes penetrating style, but linguistic pleasures are also reduced as words are needed for the mechanics and machinations of plots—implied, unfortunately, by the title.

I’m mystified by Whitehead’s aesthetic or not so aesthetic choices in constructing Cool Machine.  Maybe, stuck with the basically unchanging protagonists of the two earlier works, Whitehead believed that he needed to place them in more and more physically challenging and morally rewarding situations that happen to be—or were known to be—cinematic.  Or maybe Uncle Rich has the answer.  He says you do some jobs to pay “the Man” and some to make art.  

Having read all of Whitehead’s earlier fiction, I was disappointed from the beginning with his genre trilogy.  But perhaps I shouldn’t have been looking at Whitehead through Morrison’s presumably judgmental eyes.  After Faulkner’s masterpieces, he wrote his Snopes comic trilogy about Mississippi horse stealers and barn burners. Faulkner never wrote another great novel.  I still have hope for Whitehead.

Tom LeClair’s “Passing” trilogy stretched to five volumes.  He has a Substack called “Monsterpieces.”

A Washington Irving Sketchbook: Reflections on an American Writer

By Phillip Lopate

Princeton University Press 2026

There’s a curiously funereal cast to A Washington Irving Sketchbook, a slim new book by Phillip Lopate. The “sketchbook” mention in the title, as Lopate notes, is an allusion to the “sketches” and semi-fictional essays that dotted Irving’s career and helped make him an internationally-beloved literary figure, the very first such figure in United States history. Lopate models is own book along such lines; this is much less a full-dress biography and much more a fragmentary portrait of a man one critic characterized as “modest, equable, cheerful, affectionate, sincere,” and who represents to Lopate “the prototype of a writer’s life.”

The short chapters in this short book (the latest full biography of the man, by Andrew Burnstein, is twice as long) largely alternate between the works, the sign-posts of Irving’s life, and the resonances both have for Lopate himself, who provides at regular intervals exactly the kind of spot-on observations readers have come to expect from this author, particularly in the subtle ways he attempts to feel his way to understanding the sometimes murky depths sloshing around underneath Irving’s always-cheerful always-upbeat public exterior (when encountering Irving’s mention of “the companionship between the author and the reader,” for instance, Lopate sharply wonders if this suggests “[Irving’s] way of surmounting his own solitude”).

Lopate stops at every literary landmark in his subject’s life in order to opine a bit. He mentions Bracebridge Hall as a kind of failure, puzzlingly, and links it intriguingly to his own professional writing career. Lopate, the editor of a first-rate trilogy consisting of The Glorious American Essay, The Golden Age of the American Essay, and The Contemporary American Essay as well as the mind behind the now-classic anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, fancies he feels a fellowship with Irving at this stage of his career: “It could be that Irving had begun to tired of the personal essay game and was grinding them out. It is a form that depends almost too much on spontaneous charm and can turn arch or jejune if one isn’t careful,” he writes, adding simply, “Don’t I know it.”

But as engaging as all this is, it can’t quite escape the aforementioned funereal pall. Lopate makes it clear that one of his main reasons for writing about Irving is that nobody else is likely to do so. His Irving, the author of “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” is an overlooked figure, an underrated one, quite forgotten, almost pining to be forgotten. At one point Lopate is describing the moment when Irving, on the occasion of being named minister to Spain in 1842 , is invited to a dinner with all the assembled New York literati, who take the occasion of the invitation (Irving didn’t actually go) to praise him elaborately. Lopate takes care to bracket Irving’s reaction to this praise coming and going in decidedly killjoy tones:

Irving was always preparing himself to be forgotten. “I thought I had become so old a story as to be past all such bozzing, but they seem to think me brought out in a new edition at Washington.” His fears were simply premature: His time to be forgotten would come after his death.

Not quite forgotten, if one of our foremost men of letters could feel compelled to write a book about him, and if one of our foremost university presses could feel it feasible to publish said book, and if eight readers out of ten would recognize if not the man’s name then at least a couple of his works two hundred years after they were written, but the point is nevertheless well taken, and Lopate’s celebration in these pages will be infectious even to the uninitiated. “To read him is to love him,” one of those contemporary critics said of Irving, and if the reverse is also true, Lopate has certainly done his part.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

Plant Lady

By Minyoung Kang

Translated by Shanna Tan

Berkley 2026

Readers of Shanna Tan’s new translation of Minyoung Kang’s novel Plant Lady aren’t five pages in before they encounter things like this:

Over time, Yoohee became like a computer that had lost its ability to reboot. Not even a full performance optimization service and the latest antivirus technology could fix anything.

Or this:

By a stroke of luck, Yoohee had recently dropped into a bicycle shop at Dosan Market to have her bike chain repaired. Recalling the layout of that shop, she began suggesting plant varieties that would complement its vibe, describing each one in detail and giving instructions on how to care for them.

Fairly dire stuff; this is either the work of a lazy translator or an accurate translator of a lazy author, and it continues throughout the book. Every character is stock cardboard; every description is a flat soufflé of tired cliches and idioms; every one of the plot’s minimal twists is both illogical and thoroughly telegraphed. It’s not just fans of “Little Shop of Horrors” who’ll be bored by page 70.

This is the story of a woman named Coi Yoohee, who “uproots” herself from her home town in order to escape its worrying associations in her mind, described in boringly predictable terms as “a crackling radio that couldn’t be turned off.” She opens a plant shop in Sejin City, and after a while, it becomes a quirkily popular destination not only for plant lovers but also for women with problems. Sejin City boasts a population of about 400,000 people, but even so, the problem is always the same: men. All these women, like Yoohee herself, have problems with men, not just individual men but the whole floral arrangement.

Yoohee begins taking care of these problems, weeding them out of her customers’ lives, and gradually, very, very gradually, she and her shop come to the attention of Detective Dokyung Cha, whose superiors on the police force liken him to a tenacious dog gripping a bone. “Once he set his mind to something,” readers are told, “he became completely possessed.”

He doesn’t actually show this possession at any point in the novel (an actual dog, even a basset hound, could have put together a case against Yoohee a lot faster), but then, none of the characters in the book (Yoohee herself, Detective Cha, the various women, the gallery of boorish men who simply won’t ever say “I’m sorry” and get their heads bashed in for this omission) ever actually show any of the things we’re told about them. Instead, they just shuffle onstage for their scenes, mumble their lines in a monotone, and then shuffle offstage, or, if they happen to have a penis, into the compost heap.

The problem in the book is therefore strictly biological: men are described as genetically and morally defective, even though the book’s only serial killer isn’t a man. But more importantly, perhaps, for prospective readers, the problem with the book is strictly rhetorical: either Minyoung Kang has written a trite, boring, and obvious little fable of spades-and-pruning-shears-against-the-patriarchy, or her translator has taken a book that is somehow original against considerable odds and turned it into such a thing.

Either way, the interview with Minyoung Kang included in the back of this Berkley edition makes one things explicitly clear, if the benighted 21st century hadn’t already abundantly done so: readers are supposed to cheer for the murderer.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

The Au Pair

By Teddy Wayne

Harper 2026

Teddy Wayne’s new novel, The Au Pair, has a strikingly simple premise that leads to a strikingly straightforward plot: a struggling writer named Steven Hammer is married to a corporate warrior named Lucy Myers and has two adorable little children, Caleb and Sophie. Steven rancorously teaches creative writing to undergrads brighter than himself, and he toils hopelessly on what he hopes will be his next novel, supplied with regular ‘stipend’ payments from Lucy and not exactly encouraged by his own agent, who tells him “the era of stupidly overpaying for literary fiction is pretty much done.”

Lucy authorizes Steven to hire a Norwegian au pair for the children Lucy herself hardly ever sees, and in due course Astrid appears, “a twenty-four-year-old with a thigh gap,” and in no time at all, Steven is enamored with the au pair and referring to Lucy as “the impediment.” The affair is boiling beneath the surface as the family takes a vacation to a cabin in the Catskills, where a more or less peaceful pattern emerges:

The family settled into a routine. Between decent writing sessions, Steven took the kids to the lake and on short hikes, played simple board games, and read to them. Astrid prepared all their meals and ate hers in the guesthouse. Lucy’s workout turned out to be even more arduous than expected, and dinner was often the only time she saw the children.

But when Lucy turns up dead and a dogged police detective named Hostetler takes up the case, things complicate for hapless Steven, and the novel proceeds to a trial. “Their shared accountant detailed the couple’s respective financial standing – and how, for over a year before her death, Lucy had given her husband a monthly allowance,” the courtroom learns. “The financial motive was established in terms a high schooler could understand.”

This is part of the problem with The Au Pair: it’s all done in terms a high schooler could understand. Readers familiar with Wayne from whip-smart novels like 2016’s Loner or 2013’s The Love Song of Jonny Valentine will take up this book, with its bland, commercially-friendly cover design and its seemingly straightforward movie-of-the-week plot and read in happy anticipation of the sharp ironic twist they’re sure is coming. There’s so much raw material here for such a twist, after all, from the few but skewering glimpses of Steven’s writing world to the always-fertile ground of loveless New York marriages.

But that payoff never comes. Instead, the book just shuffles along, doing only what’s predictable and resorting with depressing regularity to frankly bad prose. “The hosannas thrown her way that had once been for him and would never be again did gnaw at him some,” we’re told about Steven at once such point. “But her success turned him on and flattered him.” Neither the flat prose nor the rote plot ever actually does anything; the whole operation simply shows up between hard covers, either unaware of or indifferent to how derivative it all is. A cold, money-driven spouse? A schlubby, thwarted writer? A leggy nanny who might be either Snow White or Medea? An ambiguous death? A detective with a working-class surname? Little children who don’t seem to care who the Hell reads them their bedtime stories? Wayne can’t possibly be unaware of the fact that Jackie Collins and Jilly Cooper were writing this same book forty years ago, only with a hell of a lot more conviction. Here’s hoping he wasn’t stupidly overpaid.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

Days of Miracle and Wonder: Paul Simon and the Trials and Triumphs of Graceland

By Ashley Kahn

Atria Books 2026

After the unsuccessful 1983 album “Hearts and Bones” and its tepid predecessor “One Trick Pony,” Paul Simon was in a creative malaise and was no longer perceived as a force in an evolving music industry now focussed on Bon Jovi, the Beastie Boys, Madonna and Metallica. The release of the “Graceland” album in 1986 changed all that.

The source of Simon’s musical inspiration, South Africa, was in the throes of its darkest hours, just before the political dawn of the 1990s. Apartheid was at its most repressive, with escalations in protests, international resistance and increasingly brutal clampdowns by a paranoid regime facing the inevitable countdown to their demise.

The amazing co-incidence of a cassette tape of South African Township Jive music, passing through several internationally random hands and eventually being lent (and never returned!) to Simon is what links these threads together in Grammy award winning music historian Ashley Kahn’s new book Days of Miracle and Wonder: Paul Simon and the Trials and Triumphs of Graceland, which tells the story behind the making of the album “Graceland.” Kahn, author of definitive books on Miles Davis and John Coltrane, tour-managed Ladysmith Black Mambazo, South Africa’s leading “isicathamiya”(Zulu acapella) harmony singing group in the post-“Graceland” period when the band was the hottest ticket in global music, which gives him unique insight into his subject, and afforded him a close relationship with Simon, whom he interviewed along with nearly 100 others involved in the making of the album.

“Graceland” gave Simon a “new” sound from South Africa that unlocked collaborative musical connections that would endure and catapult Simon out of his artistic “funk.”  The star power in the story is reflective of Simon’s standing in the music industry. The book relates many examples. Harry Belafonte, Quincy Jones,  Peter Gabriel and Philip Glass all offer Simon advice, some of which he ignores. After the fact, as the political storm broke, many African musicians were supportive of Simon’s defence of the artists right to create. Benin’s Angelique Kidjo is quoted, saying that “artists have to do what they have to do.” Hugh Masekela was quick to defend him and eventually arranged for his fellow exile Miriam Makeba to join him on the tour. Joseph Shabalala gave Simon the highest honour, the Zulu name calling “Vulindela” (“the man who opens the door”).

Kahn captures the complexity of political life in South Africa extremely well, handling the ironies of those politics maturely, as in the case of two siblings – one of whom (Barbara, in the ANC Head Office in Lusaka) was insisting on an anti-apartheid boycott of a London live show while the other (trumpeter Hugh Masekela) was playing on stage with the man who was the target of that boycott. Simon reflects that “if the album wasn’t a hit, there never would have been a show, and if the show wasn’t a hit, there never would’ve been a protest and there never would’ve been a fight.” The book also cites Simon’s later meeting with Nelson Mandela, who declared that “artists are now free to come to our country.” As the author notes, “The spectacle of a group of (British) white people picketing a concert starring the black South African exiles Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba, two of the staunchest opponents of apartheid, seemed sufficient.”  

Kahn’s account may occasionally conflict with the living memory. For instance, there’s his mention that in response to the sometimes-violent anti-tour protest action of Azapo (the Azanian People’s Organization) “concert attendances dropped dramatically”; I was in attendance at the very last concert of the global tour in January 1992 at the Durban Kings Park rugby stadium, and it was full to capacity with 50,000 ecstatic fans.

Kahn’s writing is particularly effective when covering the inner nuances of the musical creative process. He evokes the often indefinable “lightning strike” moment when musicians cross out of their traditional lanes, find new connections and create magic. This process is what defines Simon as a musician, one who seeks as much to discover music as to write it.

Simon’s methodology has always been unique, described in the book as “hearing the sounds in his head until they become musical.” Groove and rhythms take priority, lyrics follow later, serving primarily as a further percussive instrument. Why else would you find lines like “don’t I know you from the cinematographer’s party” (I Know What I Know), “ever since the watermelon” (Myth of Fingerprints) or “angels in the architecture” (You Can Call Me Al)? The book quotes from the author’s interviews with Simon on his songwriting process:  “There’s a line with an absurdist idea, with what seems a placeholder word that was never replaced – ‘ever since the watermelon’ – yet that fits the song’s cadence like a glove.” It’s all obsessively about the sound, and we are the beneficiaries.

The research that went into the book is peerless, done over decades. Kahn displays a musical sensibility that holds anyone with musical knowledge enthralled throughout. Non-musical fans might occasionally find some of the detail excessive, but a book about Paul Simon needs to reflect the detailed nature of his process in order to capture his essence.  Kahn is also very good at inserting quick bracketed definitions or explainers when the musicians reference something technical, to ensure that non-playing readers are not entirely disorientated.

Kahn achieves an admirably balanced equilibrium between the elements of the story, the 15-month-long musical genesis, the cultural interactions between Johannesburg, New York, Louisiana, Los Angeles and London, and the political turmoil, without allowing any to dominate.

Kahn defines albums as classic if “they transcend and endure.” “Graceland” did both, and Kahn has written a worthy and fascinating history of one of the most important albums of the 20th century. It captures the spirit of true musicianship, when cultural and language barriers fade to allow the creative potential of humanity to discover new connections. It is a life-affirming story that will appeal to a broad audience and have them replaying their favorite tracks. Against considerable odds, Days of Miracle and Wonder is a joyous, triumphant book.

Mike Raftery is a folk musician from Durban, South Africa

The House of Boleyn

By Tracy Borman

Atlantic Monthly Press, 2026

The story of Anne Boleyn’s rise to become the second wife of King Henry VIII – and her fall to become one of the two wives he executed – has been told and retold countless times. But just when you think no new angles could exist, along comes a novel like The House of Boleyn, which tells the larger Boleyn story from the point of view of their famous residence, Hever Castle. Centering the narrative around the manor gives author Tracy Borman the unassailable right to bring in many more points-of-view than the present-day rules would permit (authors are regularly instructed to keep narrators to one or two). Borman takes full advantage of that fact by upending many of the expectations of those narrators that her Tudor-focused audience inevitably bring to their reading.

The novel’s prologue gives us Thomas Boleyn mourning his children in the days after their executions before the main story flashes back to show everything leading up to that point. Since Hever Castle came into the Boleyn family with Thomas and left it when he died, this bookended structure suggests Hever’s own history. The particulars of Anne’s fall are scant at this stage – more important are the perfect contextual details that will foreshadow the upcoming narrative:

Until a few days ago, his daughter’s face had gazed down from the walls of almost every chamber in the sprawling palace. He had seen them being tossed on the pyre as he made his way to the Tower.

This prologue offers the first of the author’s recharacterizations, presenting Thomas as a doting and protective father instead of an overly ambitious one who happily led both his daughters into the King’s bed. Instead, Borman chooses Elizabeth Boleyn as the evil parent, plotting with her brother the Duke of Norfolk.  Other changes are equally surprising: instead of centering Anne’s first love in Henry Percy, Borman gives us an Anne who offers her virginity to Thomas Wyatt well after Henry has appeared on the scene. Instead of a Jane Seymour pursued by Henry for only seven months, we see a predatory relationship begin a full year before that. And instead of a Jane Rochford despised by her husband and taking her revenge by testifying against him and Anne, we are given a lesbian in love with her royal sister-in-law (actually the most plausible of the flips):

Much as she adored her brother, Anne knew he must be vexing as a husband, with his restless energy, childish mirth, and wandering eye. And, in contrast to most other women of her acquaintance, her sister-in-law didn’t seem stirred by George’s boyish good looks or charisma. Well, it was no matter, so long as she bore him an heir or two.

Borman also capitalizes on lesser-known legends – including a child for George and Jane – and builds out Hever’s household with fictional but necessary characters that round out the story with an antagonist (Robert Cranwell, a steward), a love interest for Thomas Boleyn (Aphra, his mother’s attendant), and a confidant (Esther, Anne’s attendant). These are carefully explained in Borman’s Author’s Note, though her credentials alone could have justified the choices.

After all, Borman is a recognized expert in the Tudor field: she has spent more than a decade with Historic Royal Palaces, most recently as Chief Historian, and serves as Chancellor of Lincoln Bishop University. Her research and work have given her a deep well of historical facts and details that she uses to great effect throughout the novel. In all, The House of Boleyn is sure to delight the Tudor reader.

Janet Wertman is the author of the Seymour Saga trilogy. Her latest work of Tudor historical fiction is Nothing Proved, the first installment in her Regina trilogy, to be followed by What Love E’er Meant later in 2026.

Unsayable: A Life in Writing

By Michael Cunningham

Random House 2026

Apparently there’s a kind of bookworm peril incumbent in the writing of a writer’s writing memoir. Delve into too much detail about the specific mechanics of your craft, and you’re accused by all posterity of being a mere rude mechanical, a saucy mender of men’s souls; skirt too many of those details and you’re accused by all posterity of being coquettish and elusive. Any writer wanting to write a navel-gazing memoir, it seems in other words, is caught between Anthony Trollope’s autobiography and Edith Wharton’s A Backward Glance.  It’s puzzling. Writers are constantly thinking (and talking) about themselves, after all, and writing is what they do; reticence might feel more natural in the memoir of a bashful steelworker.

Since Michael Cunningham’s new writer’s memoir, Unsayable is well under 300 pages, and since its chapters strain to reach five pages apiece, and since its author teaches writing for a very, very good living, it might be expected that he’d avoid either of these extremes and just deliver what his book’s subtitle promises: a life in writing.

But Unsayable would have been much more accurately if less catchily subtitled “a gay life with occasional writing thrown in.” At a couple-dozen points in a narrative that, again, isn’t exactly Proustian in length, our author seems to be making a wrenching mental effort not to write a writing life. When he’s mistily recounting his senior year at Stanford traveling to San Francisco to turn tricks for spending money, for instance, he’s fulsome (and characteristically evocative) enough to recount some details of a particular encounter with a man rude enough to be old:

I didn’t find him alluring, but neither did I find him repulsive, with his half-basketball belly and the eagle-shaped tangle of dark chest hair that spread wings across his pectorals and diminished down to his groin. The skin of his shoulders and chest was mottled, splotches of pallid pink that looked like a rash impervious to healing, and, at an oblique diagonal to his left hip, the whitish line of a scar, surgery of some sort. The minor wounds accrued in the battle of aging.

But then he abruptly stops himself, Wharton-style, from actually reflecting on the encounter. “I’m afraid I lack the courage to recount our entire conversation,” he writes. “I do, as it turns out, have some shame.” Darling, page 124 of your own goddam memoir isn’t the ideal time to discover discretion.

Or to re-discover it repeatedly, as when he decides that a memoir about a life in writing would be the perfect venue for avoiding the boring old topic of all the writing jobs he’s had. “In the interests of economy,” he writes, “I’m going to skip over my teaching jobs at Columbia and Brooklyn College (although there’s plenty to say about both), and concentrate on my current job, at Yale.” Interests of economy? Again, the book is 275 pages soaking wet. Maybe cutting the dozens and dozens and dozens of pages devoted to gawking at fellow pretty boys (including an aria to a dead crush that would have been effective if it weren’t so ham-fistedly manipulative) might have freed up space for the nominal subject at hand.

Fortunately, that subject, a life in writing, does crop up enough times to make for some intermittently interesting reading. In far less detail than any reader will want (particularly the many, many readers who rightly love this author’s fiction), Cunningham does spend some time discussing some of the practical aspects of the writer’s life, things like dreading various rounds of deep revisions on a finished novel and the like. True, he tells some genuine whoppers, the kinds of lies that are so common coming from authors that they’re practically tradition. He mentions, along these lines, that not only has he forgotten the gory details of Michiko Kakutani’s excoriating review of his novel Flesh and Blood but that he didn’t save a copy, when of course he can quote the whole thing from memory and probably has a crumpled copy of it under his pillow. Writers can be so cute sometimes.

And he’s every bit as good at atmospherics in this memoir as he is in all his fiction. Take this terrifying glimpse of peaceful, unassuming little Iowa City, where he spent two years at the Writers’ Workshop. Delicate little chrysanthemum that he apparently is, he describes the place as Mad Max’s Thunderdome: “If you were to pass through Iowa City during one of its temperate periods – in autumn before the freeze blows in, in spring before the summer sun liquefies the tar on the streets – it would strike you as bucolic and innocent,” he writes, before really ramping things up. “If you stay for a couple of years, though, you come to appreciate the effort required to build a town there at all, on an expanse of fertile earth (the soil is like chocolate cake batter) where, nevertheless, tornadoes are common and where the weather, most of the year, would annihilate you if you were unprepared, by way either of air so cold it would stop your breath or of heat so severe that if you buy a bouquet of congratulatory roses for a friend and carry them for several blocks, they will have shriveled and dropped their petals.” Yeesh – how did frail little Flannery O’Connor survive?

At one point Cunningham describes a career as a novelist as “a life spent as an amateur,” and it’s that note of sincere modesty, sounded so regularly, that ultimately saves this memoir even from itself. Coquettish? Sure, sometimes, but who doesn’t find that diverting from time to time?

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

Pushing the Wall: My Life, Writing, Drawing, and the Art of Storytelling

By Frank Miller

Saga Press 2026

Writer/artist Frank Miller is legitimately legendary in the field of comic books, firmly stationed in a company of three dozen or so men and women who did landmark work. Miller was the creative genius behind black, nihilistic oddities like Ronin or Sin City, the genius behind signpost superhero stories like Batman: Dark Knight Returns or Batman: Year One, and the genius behind black, nihilistic masterpieces like 300 or the “Elektra saga” run in Daredevil. Any one or two of these would guarantee a creator immortality in the comic book field, so Miller’s status is secure no matter what sloppy, downright cracked work he might add to that body of work, incomprehensible things like Dark Knight Strikes Again or, God forbid, Holy Terror.

This kind of status imbues his new memoir, Push the Wall, with inherent interest. The many thousands of comics readers who’ve enjoyed their work would very much like to see similar memoirs from all the other greats of the comics world. How fascinating and valuable it would be, for instance, if we had honest, grappling, detailed memoirs from figures like Bill Everett or Gil Kane or Jack Kirby.

Finishing Push the Wall, some readers will be thinking about how fascinating and valuable it would be if we had an honest, grappling, detailed memoir from Frank Miller. This sure isn’t that.

Miller organizes the book around 18 “lessons” about both life and working in the comics industry, and he fills in the inevitable pabulum of old-man-imparting-lessons with glimpses from his own autobiography: boyhood in Vermont, formative exposure to gritty New York and specifically the Greenwich Village of bygone decades, the initial scrambling in the comics industry, the burgeoning success after Elektra and Dark Knight Returns. And sometimes some of these memories, though decked out in the hack-purple prose that’s characterized Miller’s writing for fifty years, are interesting, particularly the Horatio Alger bits before he hit it big, when he was wandering around a pre-Bloomberg New York that would be all but unrecognizable to the city’s current wall-to-wall 1% inhabitants. “I arrived wide open to the strange gifts of the city’s seedy decline,” he writes in one such passage, “the Sodom and Gomorrah of Times Square, the hard-up characters hanging around fleabag hotels by Port Authority, the graffiti and urban dross in the subway, the misfits skulking in the East Village parks after dark, the crumbling, uneasy feeling of it all.”

Miller might not be the most eloquent of writers, but he’s articulate and sure as hell prolific; instead of tarping over the subject with something like “the crumbling, uneasy feeling of it all,” he could have written that feeling. His book is barely 200 pages; Saga Press would certainly have sprung for another 100.

So what’s left are the lessons, and the bits about Miller’s professional life. But the lessons are mostly things Miller himself has very publicly, very repeatedly not followed. “Sometimes you have to work with others to grow,” he writes, for example. “You have to put yourself back into learning, back into wonder, back into some spooky action.” And the anecdotes from the professional comics world are so bland and sanded-down as to be virtually press releases. About his decision to kill off his massively popular character Elektra, he writes:

Exit Elektra. When it came to my decision to end her life, I have to say, it just felt like the right thing to do. Bringing this storyline to a conclusion was the most dramatic thing I could do for the story: the narrative demanded an exclamation point, so I gave it one, in the most lapel-grabbing way possible.  

Or this, about his decision in Dark Knight Returns to turn Superman into a fascist lapdog:

At the time, Batman suited my creative vision for a superhero much more than Superman. I grew up reading and idolizing Superman. He was my first favorite superhero. But, truth be told, I had gotten pretty sick of the guy. He was just so ridiculously powerful, and his invulnerability reached the point of limiting him as a character for me.

Obviously, “it just felt like the right thing to do” and “I had gotten pretty sick of the guy” are serious disappointments, especially coming from an author who’s gotten a good deal of profitable mileage out of the crafted public image of a straight-talking maverick. There’s precious little maverick straight-talking in Push the Wall, and we’re unlikely to get a more satisfying follow-up. Although it’s at least theoretically possible that Frank Miller could strike again.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution

By Jesse Wegman

Celadon Books 2026

No less a cultural artifact than Peter Stone’s fantastic stage play “1776” made an unambiguous claim about Scots-born US Founding Father and Supreme Court justice James Wilson, a prophecy uttered with scorn and certainty: “No one will ever remember the name of James Wilson.”

In The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution, Brennan Center senior fellow Jesse Wegman clearly wants to contest this kind of verdict. He looks at Wilson’s views about the new Constitution that delegates created in 1787 in order to replace the Articles of Confederation and he teases out Wilson’s own participation, not always window-clear, since the conference sessions were secret and mostly unrecorded. Wilson was held in some regard by his fellow delegates; “No man is more clear, copious, and comprehensive than Mr. Wilson, yet he is no great Orator,” one of them wrote. “He draws the attention not by the charms of his eloquence, but by the force of his reasoning.”

In Wegman’s lively telling, the Convention of 1787 is the literal and thematic centerpiece of any attempt to “restore” Wilson to his proper place in the story of US independence, that convention in which delegates debated the nature of a new and stronger federal government, the nature of state representation in the new nation, and what kind of “chief executive” might preside over it all.

This last question prompted some awkward pauses, as Wegman writes with the same kind of narrative gusto that fills this book:

There were two explanations for the awkward silence – one absent, one present, both named George. The first: George III, by the Grace of God, King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith and so forth. Many of the delegates had personally taken up arms against the king in a bloody yearslong war for their independence, and they were in no mood to replace his transatlantic tyranny with a homegrown version.

Wegman follows Wilson from his boyhood in Scotland, his legal apprenticeship to John Dickinson, his signing of the Declaration of Independence, his participation in the fateful Constitutional Convention of 1787 in which so much of America was penned out on blank paper, his installment as one of the first justices on the Supreme Court, and right down to his squalid end, deathly ill and hiding from creditors right up until the moment of his death in 1798. And at regular intervals, he makes the case to his readers that Wilson was an almost singularly prescient figure at the founding of the country:

Consider the many ways the Constitution and American government have evolved since the founding – the expansion of the franchise to include Black former slaves, women, and virtually all adults eighteen and older; the elimination of property requirements for voting and holding office; the right of the people to elect their senators directly; the Supreme Court’s adoption of the principle of one person, one vote. In all these ways and more, modern America is remarkably aligned with what Wilson envisioned in 1787.

“Were he alive now,” Wegman writes of his mole-eyed double-chinned hero, “he would look at a Senate increasingly skewed in favor of smaller states and an Electoral College that has turned popular-vote losers into presidents twice in this century and say, I told you so.”

He was more vocal and eloquent than he’s remembered, and it’s doubtful he’ll ever get a better popular biography than this one. Time will tell if it changes anything, but any reader could be forgiven for doubting.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

Summer of Freedom: How 1945 Changed the World

By Oliver Hilmes

Translated by Jefferson Chase

Other Press 2026

Historian Oliver Hilmes’s 2025 book Ein ende und ein Anfang: Wie der Sommer 45 die Welt veränderte now appears in an English-language translation by Jefferson Chase for Other Press, a slim thing, 220 pages in a smaller form factor. The goal of the book is to give a series of prismatic sketches of the immediate postwar world through the adventures and dilemmas of a handful of individual characters: former soldiers, ordinary citizens, a famous movie director, world leaders like Winston Churchill and Harry Truman, and, regular as a cuckoo clock sounding, the literary expat Thomas Mann.

Chase unaccountably changes the book’s title, introducing an editorial slant that’s not only absent from the original but also, more importantly, absent from the book. The happy tone of “summer of freedom” seldom crops up in the book’s stories, and then mostly in fugitive glimmers. The leaders are all too worried; the ordinary citizens are scrounging through the rubble-piles that were once their homes (and waiting in endless lines every day for starvation rations); and virtually everybody else is desperately trying to piece their lives back together. The title-change also raises a small worry about the rest of the text; does Hilmes have the weakness for lazy idioms on display throughout the book (“like a house of cards,” “the crack of dawn,” “hustle and bustle,” etc. etc.), or is Chase adding those? Readers of the original from Siedler Verlag could say, but the English-language market is left to wonder.

And the book itself is decidedly odd, feeling most often like the polished gleanings of some larger, more comprehensive work about the Western shift to postwar footing. Seen as a series of colorful vignettes, the chapters and running storylines here make for vivid, pacey reading full of novelistic sleights of hand. We get scenes with a young man named John, for example, wandering around the ruins of Germany and poking into abandoned rooms with a kind of morbid curiosity:

Now, in the summer of 1945, John wants to understand how Hitler was able to seduce an entire nation. Although John is not a Nazi himself, he is fascinated by Hitler’s defunct empire. He therefore embarks on a grim search for clues, visiting the destroyed Reich Chancellery with its “Führer’s bunker” and inspecting the room where the dictator ended his life.

… only to have Hilmes then melodramatically tell us that John’s full name is … slow drum-roll … John Fitzgerald Kennedy. No foregrounding. No subsequent analysis. Just the third-act reveal.

Probably no figure among the book’s central dozen or so characters suffers more from this kind of hit-and-run theatrics than the aforementioned Thomas Mann, the century’s greatest novelist, who fled from the Nazis first to Switzerland and then the US. Readers are repeatedly given similarly tetchy scenes:

Thomas Mann has been grumpy for days. If he’s not being tormented by a severe nasal congestion, the late summer weather exhausts him. In any case, the septuagenarian is prone to getting upset. In such moments, he’s so thin-skinned that even trifles can have negative consequences.

These ill-tempered moments, complaining about poor room service or a willful little dog or some such, are almost always taken from Mann’s private diary, where we are neither required nor expected to be thinking always of Mount Olympus. The persistence of this graceless undermining will have readers naturally wondering both about the various sordid complaining going on in the author’s own private diary and about whether or not Hilmes was assigned The Magic Mountain in college and has been patiently plotting his revenge ever since.

After a fairly quick page-turning reading experience, Summer of Freedom leaves its readers better stocked in gossip but not really wiser. Books about the postwar experiences of Mann or Truman or even Billy Wilder have been written to much better effect, and a dozen novels have captured the ‘novelistic’ side with far greater depth of feeling. And as for that bit about how the year changed the world, even the author seems almost to forget such a high-flying promise shortly after it’s made.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

Two Ships: Jamestown 1619, Plymouth 1620, and the Struggle for the Soul of America

By David S. Reynolds

Penguin Press 2026

David Reynolds, author of a fairly good biography of Abraham Lincoln and a very good book called Beneath the American Renaissance, has a new book: Two Ships: Jamestown 1619, Plymouth 1620, and the Struggle for the Soul of America. It’s an animated look at the tortured history of American slavery and its immediate aftermath, but even so, general-interest readers of popular-market history can rightfully tremble at the phrase “struggle for the soul of America” in the subtitle of any book. It’s a signal of running sap, an open invitation to deplorable manipulative nonsense.

There’s a bit of nonsense. Despite writing a book about slavery, Reynolds never actually calls anyone the word “slave” (one of academia’s newest and most ridiculous ironclad demands), for instance, and, utterly inexcusably, the book includes no bibliography.

But in the big majority, Two Ships is excellent and fast-paced, taking its title from the so-neat-it-could-only-be-real historical parallel of the Dutch ship White Lion, which brought 20 slaves to Jamestown in 1619, and the Mayflower, which brought the Pilgrims to Massachusetts in 1620. Thinking about the American Civil War, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner reflected that “In the holds of those two ships were concealed the germs of the present direful war, and the simple question now is between the Mayflower and the slave ship.” These were the fundamental opposing forces Sumner saw, and he solemnly declared “The Mayflower must surely prevail.”

Reynolds takes up this essential conflict, between Puritan and Cavalier, and traces it through a century of American history, touching on dozens of key moments and narrating them with unflagging energy. He catalogs firsts, including 1700’s The Selling of Joseph by magistrate Samuel Sewell, infamous for his involvement in the Salem Witch Trials; Reynolds calls Sewell “the first American colonist to publish an antislavery tract,” naturally invoking the rare Scriptural passage that seems not to endorse slavery: “He that Stealeth a Man and Selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to Death.”

A religious tug-of-war happens throughout the book, and Reynolds, author of a book on John Brown, is insightful about every aspect of it. Noting that “there had long been a strain within Puritanism the prioritized divine law over human law,” he writes that Brown reveals “both the perils and the promise of antislavery Puritanism,” and the main strength of Two Ships is its skill at balancing that promise with those perils.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood

By Rasheed Newson

Flatiron Books 2026

The capacious imagination and rock-solid storytelling skills evident in Rasheed Newson’s electrifying debut My Government Means to Kill Me acted as both a sign and a warning, since it both announced the arrival of a first-rate writer and raised the specter of that writer suffering the notorious sophomore slump that so often happens with second novels. So many promising debuts are retroactively blighted a bit by some gaseous anomaly emitted on tight contract half a dozen months later.

There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood gives a quick bit of relief and an intensely involving read. It’s the story of a tall, gorgeous man black man named Ruben Singleton, whose story is told here by a studio enforcer and backstage problem-solver named Aaron Toussaint. Ruben is a thunderbolt of looks and charisma, and his ascent in a still very segregated Hollywood begins when a smitten George Cukor sees him in all his glory and immediately renames him Xavier C. Barlow, who’s quickly outfitted with a print-ready version of his sordid, unhappy past. “His life story, after it was condensed, sanitized, and fabricated,” Toussaint recalls in his trenchant, sardonic narrative tone, “has only a fleeting reference to his upbringing in Gary, Indiana: Xavier was orphaned at a young age before being raised by a loving aunt.”

Toussaint tells his own story as well, likewise mostly unhappy, taking readers from his service in Korea to the beginning of his association with Horace Dixon, whose business manager he would later become. But the book’s focus is Xavier, and through him the world of race and power in studios of the 1950s, on the sets, and at the parties of the dream factory. And since Toussaint’s work has introduced him to virtually everybody, particularly the minorities struggling for work and recognition, the narrative is full of name-dropping. “At an outer table were Black men and women, who drew worldwide fame from the characters that they pretended to be,” reads one such passage. “There at a table for ten sat Sidney [Poitier], Diahann [Carroll], Xavier [Westwood], Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr., Lena Horne, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, James Edwards, and Eartha Kitt (eight months pregnant).” In scene after scene, all our main characters encounter discrimination both overt and more insidious, as when they visit “almighty” studio boss MK Garten on a hot sunny day. “He made a show of having his manservant bring us water, there was ice in Mr. Garten’s glass of water, unlike ours,” readers are told. “He called us by our first names; we’d been instructed by his secretary to refer to him as Mr. Garten.”

This racial element is naturally prominent and persistent throughout the ultimately sad story Toussaint has to tell, but the more memorable thread running through There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood is its illicit and overriding sensuality, with Toussaint characterizing his feelings for Xavier as “a purifying high, a sing worth the damnation.” It’s this thread that makes him such a fascinating narrator, reliable to exactly the extent that he distrusts his own reliability. “My heart wasn’t to be trusted,” he confesses. “It chose arousal over prudence. It confused risk with romance.”

No sophomore slump here, in other words. There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood is every bit as solid and thoughtful and moving as its predecessor.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News