American Pope: Leo XIV’s Road from the South Side of Chicago to Vatican City

By Daniel Burke & Scott Detrow

Flatiron Books 2026

As the life stories of so many public figures demonstrate, writing biographies of still-extant people is inherently perilous. Lincoln goes to the theater. Byron dies in Greece. Prince Charles finally gets a new job. And suddenly, every existing biography written in the hope of pro tem viability is tinnily outdated.

NPR religion editor Daniel Burke and “All Things Considered” cohost Scott Detrow are likely aware of this danger, particularly since it hovers over their new book American Pope: Leo XIV’s Road from the South Side of Chicago to Vatican City. This is the story of Robert Prevost’s dorky youth and hyper-earnest young manhood as he entered the Church and the Augustinian Order, and although in their telling he seems to have been a cheerful, intelligent, multifaceted figure, there’d even so be no book about him if he weren’t going on to become Pope Leo XIV in 2025.

It's interesting to watch him deal with the Church matters of his day, including the massive sex scandal that broke into public awareness twenty years ago, although his response was circumspect to the point of being mealy-mouthed, with him writing to his Augustian leaders in 2003, “I am sorry to have to write such a letter, but it is extremely important that we be prepared to respond compassionately and responsibly if there are cases of wrongdoing on the part of any of our brothers.” Which is, given the fact that the wrongdoing is decades of child molestation and the intentional shuffling around of known child predators, pretty much the bare moral minimum (particularly since the comment is unclear on who’s receiving the compassionate responses).

The portrait presented here is, oddly enough, that of a comfortingly ordinary man. This underscores what is naturally the most remarkable thing to happen to this ordinary man. At the death of Pope Francis, the princes of the Church assemble to discuss and debate (and, as our authors make clear, eat, good Lord, how cardinals eat). The book sees some of this through the perspective of US Cardinal Timothy Dolan, a charismatic Trump-thug who relates the dark horse nature of Prevost’s chances at ascending to the throne of Saint Peter:

Dolan had been a public face of the American church for two decades. But sitting in the General Congregation meetings, he began to consider that the first American pontiff might be a radically different kind of figure. During one of the meetings’ many coffee breaks, he brought an espresso to an older cardinal, one who was too old to vote in the conclave. They sat there together in the auditorium sipping their drinks.

“So, who do you think?” Dolan asked.

The older cardinal looked down toward a group of their peers at the front of the room. He pointed at Prevost.

The authors do their best to highlight the position of this new Pope facing an uncertain future and “massive technological change.” “The math major and canon lawyer had taken note as artificial intelligence, in particular, had exponentially advanced by leaps and bounds, largely without any moral guidelines or boundaries shaping its use and development.”

AI, yes indeed. But American Pope was likely still in drafts when US Vice President James David Donald Bowman Vance said the Pope should be “careful” when talking about theology. The book had not yet been printed when the US President called this Pope a “loser.” The book was only just in bookstores when Pope Leo underwent surgery for lung cancer. His Holiness is over 70, but even so, American Pope is something of a prologue. The papacy will be the point of the life, and with any luck, that papacy might still have ten very eventful years to go. Maybe we can look for a sequel in 2036.

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

Weimar Republic: The Death of a Democracy

By Victor Sebestyen

Pantheon 2026

How and why the Nazis gained power in the 1930s, ultimately unleashing the deadliest war in human history, has been the subject of immense historical analysis and debate for decades. The bottomless inquiry is largely led by a desire to prevent the next potential catastrophe or vile dictator-to-be. While the ‘how’ is relatively clear, the ‘why’ remains an enigma, one that is particularly relevant in today’s tumultuous political climate. In his latest book Weimar Republic: The Death of a Democracy, Victor Sebestyen attempts to untangle the cultural, political, economic, and psychological forces that dissolved democracy and opened the door for fascism. In a blended work of history and journalistic storytelling, Sebestyen immerses readers within the short-lived Weimar Republic, a booming, blistering culture utterly unaware of the horrors looming on the horizon.

The fallout of WWI left Europe in a state of unprecedented devastation, not merely in terms of human casualties and financial ruin, but political devastation as well. The 1917 Russian Revolution saw the overthrow of the Romanovs and Germany, too, witnessed the abdication by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918, ending the Hohenzollern dynasty’s 400-year rule as the war on the Western Front drew to a close. In Weimar Germany, Sebestyen quickly catches readers up to speed with an overview of the German Revolution of 1918, establishment of the Weimar Republic, and the political assassinations of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The focus then shifts to the newly formed Ebert government, whose initial moves included removing previously restrictive censorship and giving free rein to artistic expression–reforms that immediately “began to divide the country and became one of many aspects of modern life that drove people further apart.” From the revolutionary Bauhaus school to the hypnotic dancing of Anita Berber to raunchy cabaret numbers, Sebestyen dazzles in his intertwining of artistic and cultural developments into the historical narrative at its foundation. Spanning thirty-six chapters, the work follows a largely linear timeline, but frequently dips into isolated chapters on the emergence of the “New Woman,” rampant drug use and prostitution, American-imported Jazz, and all sorts of distinguishing characteristics that mark this infamous era.

Balancing these digressions, Sebestyen uncovers the forces leading to widespread desperation and frantic cultural unraveling across the nation. An examination of reports and public response makes clear that the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles were not the sole cause of resentment and political radicalism, but they thrust the country into deeper economic collapse, worsened unemployment, and fueled the reactionary Right, which already seethed at the so-called “November criminals.” Sebestyen outlines how the political center was already hollowing out by the 1920s, with an overwhelming number of youth aligning with the Right and as the country continued to drift toward ultranationalism. In addition to its lack of legitimacy and the radical cultural shifts that polarized the country, the republic was politically weakened by the refusal of the highest judges to rule in favor of the Reichstag’s sweeping reforms. Choked by political violence and financial strife, German citizens grew increasingly open to vitriolic rhetoric as long as it came from a zealous, seemingly forceful leader. And although popularity of the communist party persisted in the Weimar Republic, a division between socialists and communists crippled the Left as Sebestyen explains:

Despite the misery of the poor and the working class in the Depression, the mass unemployment and the fast-growing popularity of the Nazis, the socialists and Communists, for their own party reasons, could never find a way to work together - or even to stop fighting each other on the streets. A suicidal error, as it made life so much easier for the Far Right, which was adept at exploiting the splits on the Left.

Attempting to break new ground is quite difficult when the subject is the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, yet Sebestyen manages to deliver an intriguing examination of the pivotal and compelling period. His narrative is well-paced, seamlessly drawing upon quotes and experiences from prominent artists and revolutionary figures to construct thrilling accounts that paint a vivid image of mercurial Berlin. However, Sebestyen’s limitations and journalistic tendencies appear and hinder the work’s shelf life. He too often dates his analysis with modern references and draws upon the current political atmosphere to construct parallels—some useful and others paper thin. His explanations remain surface-level when discussing the major moments, such as the 1930 election and the dissolution of the Reichstag, which is recounted in a few paragraphs.

Written in the midst of global political uncertainty, Weimar Republic is a gripping and relevant historical work. More than a broad overview of post-war Germany, Sebestyen educates and entertains readers on the cultural and artistic elements that defined the era and became generationally influential. Limited in rigor and scope, it fails to deliver a thorough examination of the political and economic movements, but by sacrificing those details, sheds a brighter light on the artistic scene. Though not a defining work on the transient republic, it serves as an equally engaging and informative read.

Brock Covington is an entrepreneur and writer. He can be found on the YouTube channel "The Active Mind" and on his substack: brockcovington.substack.com

Shadow Before the Flame: The Hindenburg Disaster and the Prelude to War

By Catherine Grace Katz

Viking 2026

If the 21st century knows anything at all about the disaster of the Hindenburg, likely two items suggest themselves: the quick black-and-white video taken on May 6, 1937 at Lakehurst, New Jersey, showing the massive airship being consumed in flames as it sinks to the airstrip, and the accompanying audio by news broadcaster Herb Morrison, famously sobbing “Oh, the humanity, and all the passengers …”

Historian Catherine Grace Katz fleshes out that bare-bones picture smartly and elaborately in her new book Shadow Before the Flame: The Hindenburg Disaster and the Prelude to War, and the corny portentousness of the title is matched, unfortunately, by long patches of oddly clunky prose throughout the text itself, sometimes clogging the story’s momentum even at what should be the peak of excitement:

“It burst into flames! It burst into flames and it’s falling! It’s crashing!” Herb Morrison shouted as the Hindenburg, which had been standing still before him just a moment ago, was suddenly engulfed in fire. To some on the ground, it looked as if, just for a moment, a tiny light had appeared on the Hindenburg’s cover just in front of the tail like a flame from a paper match smoldering at a distance. Almost instantaneously, a neon glow ran along the nearby riblike girders. Then a burst of light appeared, which erupted into a giant inferno near the airship’s tail as the crowd around Morrison let out a terrified scream. Before anyone could register what they had just seen, the entire tail section of the zeppelin was consumed in a fireball spitting tongues of flames up into the sky as if the Hindenburg were made of flash paper.

That “giant inferno” occupies dead center of Katz’s narrative, which extends beyond it into the usual follow-up of what happened to all the witnesses and survivors, as well as what happened to the zeppelin industry itself. But more intriguingly, Katz also extends her story backwards from that immortal moment, examining in satisfying detail something that people tend to forget: the giant airship that died so famously at Lakehurst, New Jersey had a tail fin decorated with an enormous swastika. Katz chronicles not only the burgeoning of airships as a means of fast luxury travel (on the one hand, you could make an Atlantic crossing in half the time of a steamship; on the other hand, well, the Hindenburg disaster – ironically, the Hindenburg and the Titanic were about the same length) but also its increasing co-option by the Nazi state, which Katz views with a very effective combination of scorn and caution. “Beneath the Nazis’ regular bouts of buffoonery, the threat of what still could come lingered palpably over the correspondent corps,” she writes of those earlier, darkening days. “Small but obvious signs were everywhere.”

But it’s the few moments of the disaster itself that must ultimately command any Hindenburg book, and Katz has assembled an intensely-packed catalog of grotesqueries, from a mother throwing her little children out a window of the burning craft without being sure she wasn’t simply throwing them to their death to a passenger who was careful to remove his false teeth before he hurled himself from a rail way and hoped to survive the impact. Even here, at the heart of the story, an odd awkwardness lingers around the book’s prose:

“Everybody outside,” Lehmann commanded as he went out the starboard window. Pruss, Sammt, Wittemann, and the other officers did the same. It was still about a five-meter drop, and Sammt landed on all fours. Pruss was disoriented as he landed and ran backward into the raging flames, disappearing into a wall of fire as the bright-white smoke of hydrogen was quickly replaced by black clouds of burning diesel fuel.

Ran backward? Like in a circus act?

For the most part, Shadow Before the Flame manages to recover from this kind of bumpy passage. Certainly it’s the fullest and most richly contextualized history of the Hindenburg disaster to appear in English. Readers will approach those famous few seconds of Herb Morrison sobbing with an enhanced awareness of the bigger picture.

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 Forsaken Founder: Gouverneur Morris, the Unsung Patriot Who Wrote the Constitution, Stood Up to Slavery, and Survived the Reign of Terror

By Scott S. Greenberger

37 Ink/Simon & Schuster 2026

Ten years ago, Scott Greenberger produced his delightfully table-overturning book The Unexpected President: The Life and Times of Chester A. Arthur, in which he took the 21st President of the United States and insisted he was not, in fact, a buffoonish walrus but rather a secretly significant trailblazer unjustly forgotten by history.

In his new book, The Forgotten Founder, his subject is that perennial Founding Father dark horse, Gouverneur Morris, who “reorganized the ragtag Continental Army into a force that vanquished the preeminent military power of the age,” “played a pivotal role in putting the new nation on solid financial footing,” and “rewrote the final draft [of the Constitution] so that it did not endorse slavery – either explicitly or implicitly.” Oh, and designed the street grid of New York. “James Madison? The president was often drunk on wine or high on opium and so withered that his wife had signaled her openness to an affair,” Greenberger writes, directing the reader’s attention instead to his man Morris: “He was the penman of the Constitution, and the sole author of its eloquent Preamble.”

As might be guessed from such opening remarks, Greenberger has no intention of being a faint-hearted fan. He can draw something of a decorous veil over the man’s scabrous philandering, although more public performances present a steeper challenge, as when Morris heaved and stumped to the front of a crowd in 1799 to mumble his way through a tribute to George Washington, who’d died a few days earlier (before reading the plea Morris had sent him at Mount Vernon, urging him to run for a third term as President):

The City of New York asked him to deliver a eulogy at St. Paul’s Chapel. “In him were the courage of the soldier, the intrepidity of a chief, the fortitude of a hero,” Morris said. “He loved glory, but still more he loved his country.” Though he fretted afterward that he had botched the delivery, he sent copies of the address to friends in Europe – a gesture not of vanity but of reverence. Washington had been his moral compass; he wanted the Old World to know what America had lost.

He had, in fact, botched his delivery, and his mass-circulation of his bland remarks was, in fact, a gesture of vanity, but it’s nice to have a talented biographer for a friend. It comes in handy, for instance, if you continue to botch your public speeches. Morris was ushered to the bedside of the dying Alexander Hamilton, most famously, and then later gave a eulogy for the friend who’d been his enemy for so many years. He botched this eulogy too, but Greenberger is ready:

Posterity judged the eulogy much as Morris had feared: less a stirring oration than an act of moral composure. Yet in its restraint lay its power. Where others demanded retribution, Morris offered dignity; where grief might have flamed into civil chaos, he preached order and mercy. History came to see it not as a failure of passion, but as the last service one founder could render another – a farewell that steadied a mourning nation rather than inflaming it.

Greenberger’s reclaiming zeal worked to make his President Arthur biography so enjoyable, and it works the same magic here. This forgotten Founding Father has had a great many biographies (somewhere, James Otis must be seething), but none so entertaining as this one. “Our most colorful Founding Father has been denied his rightful place in American history,” Greenberger insists. “It’s time to set the record straight.”

Melanie Miller had the same mission in her 2024 book on the unjustly forgotten Morris. So did Dennis Rasmussen in his 2023 book on the unjustly forgotten Morris. And James Kirschke in 2005. And Richard Brookhiser in 2003. Theodore Roosevelt, writing for the great old American Statesmen series, banged the drum of the forgotten Morris particularly stoutly in 1888. So did Jared Sparks in 1832, when some of the Morris bastards were just hitting puberty. These biographers are railing against the injustice of how history bestows its laurels, and of course they know better, know that this process can’t be forced and is indifferent to actual merit. Gourverneur Morris will go right on being forsaken, much to the relief of the publishing industry.

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 Letters of Robert Frost: Volume 4 – 1937-1946

Edited by Robert Bernard Hass, Henry Atmore, Donald Sheehy, and Mark Richardson

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2026

The Belknap Press continues its superbly authoritative collection of the letters of Robert Frost with volume 4, the penultimate volume, covering the years 1937 to 1946. It’s a big hefty volume, lovingly and magnificently annotated, covering years that were full of tragedy for the great poet (the death of his wife, his son), surprise joy (falling in love, after the age when some men expect it), and the steadily-strengthening reality of his own celebrity. He’d already won three Pulitzers by the time this volume opens and would go on to win his fourth by the time it ends. Students, shop clerks, stock traders, and scholars read his work with the kind of shared enjoyment that had been known by figures like Longfellow before him but would be known to no American poet after him. And as editors Robert Bernard Hass, Henry Atmore, Donald Sheehy, and Mark Richardson make clear in their brief, insightful Introduction to this volume, the experience still had the power to amaze the man himself:

As the thirties gave way to the forties, and the forties to the fifties, he would attain bona fide celebrity. Already in March 1936 he could write his son Carol about the reception of the lectures he gave as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard: “I’ve never been welcomed anywhere with the noise and enthusiasm I met with … You’d think I was some musical hero.” It would grow harder for him to keep from being king when it was in him and in situation. His poetry had developed, if not a ring of false commerciality, than anyway an occasional ring of generalized Rotarian dicta.

In these letters, we see Frost’s fame steadily emboldening what earlier volumes in this series made clear was an inherent propensity for flintiness. At almost every turn in this latest volume, even, perhaps touchingly, in the missives that approach the closest to being love letters, we see the struggles of a man for whom expected kindliness was a distinct strain that often cracked. When he’s fretting about being appointed Ralph Waldo Emerson Fellow in Poetry at Harvard, he protests a bit too much to his friend Robert Hillyer (eschewing, as per usual, apostrophes):

Listen! I have scared myself with what I have set going. It wont do for me to profess Latinity. I have been warned off already. [Arthur Stanley, of Harvard] Pease though writing warmly to welcome my idea, yet winds up with the suggestion that I might like John Finley as a watcher in my classes. Don’t I know those bozos from of old? They are too humanistic to be human. I am only fooling myself if I think that large treatment can make them over into anything but what they are. Dont let me speak scornfully of them. They have their proper pride in their peculiar knowledges that I would be the last one to want to reduce.

These are the first years when Frost can feel free to fully embody the talismanic grumpiness that would go on to become an even visual reference for the man. Partly, as these letters make clear, this was a measure of self-defence. Fame brought fame-seekers. Opportunists, schemers, and good-hearted but overreaching folk started to want more from Frost than he was willing to give, and they got blunter and blunter responses, as in 1942 when the representative of the Rocky Mountain Writers’ Conference were congenially snapped at:

Now listen. You dont want me kicking round at my age for nothing. I can’t run here and there for the sake of running. There must be some return proportioned to my expenditure of strength. Seven hundred dollars wont be enough to bring me to the Coast. And there must be some warmth of assurance that somebody wants me besides you and Earle Bernheimer. I haven’t had one word of invitation yet from anybody but you. Unless you make things look better – more inviting – right away, Im afraid you will have to give me up, and make up your mind to get along with only my ghostly presence at your conferences …

As with the earlier volumes in this series, this fourth volume is a quiet marvel of concentrated scholarship. Every quotidian detail undergirding these letters, every recoverable reference big and small, is provided as promptly, smoothly, and unobtrusively as a Buckingham Palace equerry slipping you a breath mint before you fully realize you want one. And the result is something at once more demanding than a standard biography of Frost would be (not that these are exactly thick on the ground, Jay Parini’s terrific book being now distinctly long in the tooth) but entirely more satisfying.

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

In Paperback: Paul of Dune

By Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson

Tor 2026

Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson have written 19 books set in the “Dune” science fiction universe created by Herbert’s father Frank, author Dune and its five sequels. Those original six novels covered thousands of years of a future history in which humanity has developed a quasi-feudal arrangement in which the noble houses of the Landsraad counterbalance the more mercantile organizations, and all are ruled by an emperor. And since this history is not scrupulously contiguous, there are gaps in the storyline that act like dinner signs to any writer seeking to fill them in.

There were plenty of those fan fiction writers before Herbert’s own son tried his hand at it, teaming up with Kevin Anderson for 1999’s Dune: House Atreides. But this and all subsequent novels had the imprimatur of Brian Herbert’s surname and the aegis of Tor Publishing, and they fed the appetite of Dune fans who earnestly wished Frank Herbert had written more books about Paul Atreides, the spice, the sand worms, and the desert planet Dune.

Herbert and Anderson dutifully recreate the names and settings of those original six novels by Herbert’s father, and they zero in on virtually every gap or lacuna found anywhere in Frank Herbert’s books.

One of the most notorious of those gaps is the one between Dune and Dune Messiah. At the end of Frank Herbert’s blockbuster original novel, widely regarded as one of the greatest science fiction novels of all time, young Paul Atreides has managed to seize the emperor’s throne, marry the emperor’s daughter Princess Irulan, and positioned himself to unleash his savage Fremen hordes on a complacent galaxy. At the beginning of Dune Messiah, years have passed, the Fremen jihad has conquered the galaxy under his flag, and Paul has learned the bitter realities of imperial rule.

2008’s pastiche novel Paul of Dune seeks to tell the story of that gap, and after nearly 20 years, Tor has re-issued the book in a little trader paperback with lovely new cover art by Sonia Lai.

In this book, Paul is facing the practical nuances of establishing his rule. In a thematic concentration that runs throughout the book, this process involves an intricate balancing act between Paul’s two halves: the son of House Atreides who managed a successful coup against as sitting emperor, and Muad’Dib, the religious leader commanding the fanatic loyalty of the Fremen (some variation of “If Muad’Dib commands it, we will obey” is repeated roughly 500,000 times in the course of this book’s 500 pages). And instead of reading Frank Herbert delicately sketch this balancing act in fine brush-strokes, we get his son and co-writer … simply explaining it all:

Though Paul’s prescience told him he had to win many victories, he hoped to prevail on most leaders of the Imperium with subtlety and intelligence, using sophisticated means of persuasion. His mother had already begun to make overtures for him. He had to demonstrate that surrender to and alliance with Muad’Dib was a smart decision, the best alternative. The only alternative. But in order to accomplish that, he needed to employ the Paul Atreides side of his brain, rather than the raw Fremen side of Maud’Dib. Through all available means, he needed to control what remained of the Landsraad. He needed to gather allies.

Paul has the support of his Fremen, including the fanatical but scheming Korba, and he relies on his mother, Lady Jessica, and his family’s faithful retainer, Gurney Halleck. And when he briefly returns to his home planet of Caladan, he seems to gain another supporter, the foppish Ginaz Swordsmaster Bludd (every bit as cringe-worthy has Frank Herbert’s character Hayt — it seems to be a family trait; Brian’s lucky he wasn’t christened Wheelbarrow or Moonblossom). Bludd is easily the book’s most memorable character (not exactly a reassuring recommendation, considering the book’s title), a fascinating combination of pomposity and deviousness. He knew Paul when the Fremen savior was a child, and this gives him the kind of presumption that leads him into intrigue and eventually peril. The process is skillfully put forward as an exemplar of what a great many old Atreides retainers must have experienced during this period in Frank Herbert’s story. Every time Bludd confronts Korba, each bristles with possessiveness over the side of Paul they know best:

Bludd couldn’t believe this desert fighter would try to engage in a game of one-upmanship with him. In response, he said, “I knew Paul Atreides when he was just a stripling, and I saved his life when your mother was still scraping out the stink of your swaddling clothes. Read your history, Korba — Imperial history. Divvy Dinari got most of the credit, but I was there with him at the wedding massacre. I know the truth, and so does Paul.”

“Imperial history,” Korba sneered. “Paul Atreides. I speak of Muad’Dib, not the son of a Landsraad nobleman. His life before he came to Sietch Tabr and took the name of Usul  has little relevance now.”

“You cannot know a man by half his life,” Bludd said, annoyed. “Isn’t that why Princess Ireland wrote his biography, which you all carry around like a holy textbook?”

Paul of Dune never quite feels like any of Frank Herbert’s original Dune novels. But Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson are by this point old hands at spinning science fiction yarns, and this one satisfies.

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

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.