6 New Paperbacks to Read This Week
Itching for a new book? Check out these recent paperback releases, including a cultural history of spoken word poetry, a survey of cybercrime in the information age, Emma Donoghue’s new novel and more.
Here are six paperbacks we recommend →
“The only way not to go off course is to look back,” the filmmaker Sergio Cabrera reflects in this novel. As Cabrera’s life lurches from 1960s China to the jungles of Colombia to modern-day Barcelona, Vásquez crafts a narrative about memory, history and time that, in the words of our reviewer, “can’t be described, only experienced and then pointed to.”
The history of spoken word poetry, dating to the art’s origins in the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, is one of music, race and human dignity, Bennett writes. It is also a story about language and expression, Tas Tobey explained in his review, that is addressed with rigor and tenderness in this “heartwarming narrative of the evolution of an art form.”
Ng writes about the loss and exclusion synonymous with Chinese American life in the United States. Tracing her father’s entry as a “paper son” in 1940 and her family’s shuffling between San Francisco, Manhattan and the California desert, she creates what our reviewer called “a figurative oil work, with structured lines building layers of her family’s history.”
Anne Lister, the Yorkshire landowner and diarist, is a fiery presence at York’s Manor School for Young Ladies. Told through the adoring eyes of Lister’s roommate Eliza Raine, Donoghue’s historical novel unspools their passionate, tormented and ultimately tragic relationship.
Shapiro, a law and philosophy professor at Yale, focuses on the human and societal behaviors that enable cybercrimes, moving seamlessly between discussions on Descartes, Putin and “The Matrix” in this tour of five major hacks over the past four decades.
Through her dreams, Flor Monte can predict when someone will die. This ability colors an ominous announcement: She is planning a living wake for herself. Leading up to the event, as multiple generations of the Monte family grapple with this news, Acevedo threads their lives in New York with memories of the Dominican Republic in this prismatic novel.
