Happy Thanksgiving to our American readers. Here are eight books to be grateful for, wherever you are: New poetry collections from the great Patrick Rosal and Frank Bidart, novels about the lives (and deaths) of women in North Dakota and South Korea, a posthumous spy story from the beloved John le Carré. The New York Times Magazine’s ambitious and far-reaching 1619 Project has been turned into an even more ambitious and far-reaching book, the political insider Huma Abedin offers a revealing look at her public and private lives, and the religion reporter Mark Oppenheimer explores grief and resilience in a Jewish neighborhood haunted by violent tragedy. These books aren’t “easy reading” — the stories they tell can be complicated and uncomfortable, uncompromising — but they pursue their truths tirelessly and often beautifully, and that’s a good reason to give thanks, anytime.
Gregory Cowles
Senior Editor, Books
Twitter: @GregoryCowles
THE 1619 PROJECT: A New Origin Story, edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones, Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman and Jake Silverstein. (One World, $38.) A revised and expanded version of a series of essays first published in The New York Times Magazine in 2019, this essential book delivers an account of America’s entanglement with slavery and its legacy, from the country’s colonial beginnings to today, that is cogent, meticulous and revelatory. “Despite what demagogues claim,” Adam Hochschild writes in his review, “honoring the story told in ‘The 1619 Project’ and rectifying the great wrongs in it need not threaten or diminish anyone else’s experience, for they are all strands of a larger American story. Whether that fragile cloth holds together today, in the face of blatant defiance of election results and the rule of law, depends on our respect for every strand in the weave.”
LEMON, by Kwon Yeo-sun, translated by Janet Hong. (Other Press, $20.) This taut South Korean novella — about the murder of a beautiful teenage girl, as recalled from the alternating perspectives of three women who knew her — is not so much narrated as spilled, confessed, blurted out. “‘Lemon’ should be read slowly and closely in order to appreciate it when Kwon pulls off what I can describe only as a sleight of hand,” Oyinkan Braithwaite writes in her review. “Her sentences are crisp, concise and potent; just one contains as much meaning as two or three of your average storyteller’s. … Her hypnotic effect will stay with the reader long after the last page has been read. You’ll wish there were more; but you’ll be grateful it ended as it did.”
SILVERVIEW, by John le Carré. (Viking, $28.) The great espionage writer’s last completed novel features a young bookstore owner in an English seaside town who gets caught in the machinations between two cunning spymasters, as le Carré reveals an intelligence agency marred by political factions and morally questionable acts. “In le Carré’s world of cunning stratagems, the question is not only whether they will work but whether they will be worth it, Joseph Finder writes in his review. “If ‘Silverview’ feels less than fully executed, its sense of moral ambivalence remains exquisitely calibrated.”
BOTH/AND: A Life in Many Worlds, by Huma Abedin. (Scribner, $30.) Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide opens up about the 2016 election and the very public dissolution of her marriage in this memoir. Abedin shows readers what it was like to be in rooms where decisions are made while bearing the burden of unimaginable choices of her own. “It’s clear from the outset that this book is not a sidekick’s tale, but the story of a person of substance — someone determined to tell her own story,” Susan Dominus writes in her review. “The catalog of her Job-like suffering — the shame to which she was subject for actions other than her own — is at times excruciating to read; but it is as if in uttering those episodes aloud, she ensures that they do not own her.”
SQUIRREL HILL: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood, by Mark Oppenheimer. (Knopf, $28.95.) In 2018, a shooter killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Oppenheimer’s propulsive narrative traces the aftermath as residents bury and mourn, organize rallies, and field the onslaught of national media and “trauma tourists.” “Oppenheimer paints the portrait of an urban neighborhood that never ceded its tightknit Jewish population to the suburbs,” Irina Reyn writes in her review. “How ‘Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’ became the site of the most deadly antisemitic attack on American soil and what happened afterward unfold with the precision of the best suspense stories.”
O BEAUTIFUL, by Jung Yun. (St. Martin’s, $27.99.) A journalist risks everything to chase a scoop in the oil fields of her native North Dakota, only to discover it’s not the story she was expecting. This mesmerizing and timely novel, the author’s second, provides an on-ramp into conversations about racism, environmentalism, journalism, economics and sisterhood. “The loudest voices in ‘O Beautiful’ are the ones we never hear,” Elisabeth Egan writes in her latest Group Text column. “They’re the perspectives and experiences of women who have disappeared” — principally, “the 28 women, teenagers and girls (‘a figure that’s both shockingly high and surely an undercount’) from the Mahua tribe who have been reported missing over a period of two years. When Elinor turns her attention to their stories, her article — and her future as a woman of words — begins to take shape.”
What Is the 1619 Project?
Acknowledging a historic moment. In August 2019, The New York Times Magazine launched the 1619 Project, spearheaded by Nikole Hannah-Jones. The project explored the history of slavery in the United States and was released to coincide with the anniversary of a ship carrying the first enslaved Africans to the English colonies.
THE LAST THING: New & Selected Poems, by Patrick Rosal. (Karen & Michael Braziller/Persea, $26.95.) Physical exuberance takes flight in Rosal’s poetry, which counters emotional and historical pain with sheer delight in the body. His newest work abandons realism for dream visions and monologues. “The language in these pages remains visceral, demotic, open to all comers and capable of neat aural effects,” Stephanie Burt writes in her review. “Rosal’s lively vernacular — especially in the lengthier, newer poems — can sound almost improvised, proudly suited for oral delivery: The poems invite us to hear them out loud.”
AGAINST SILENCE, by Frank Bidart. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Bidart’s poems float and swerve, at once cinematic and oddly intimate. Here he seems interested in individual and collective ethics, and sees a threat in silence — both the kind that opposes speech in life and the kind found in death, which we’re all up against. “Bidart is exciting to read and hard to explain,” Daisy Fried writes, reviewing the book alongside four other recent poetry collections. “Bidart is dispassionate but never detached; at his most thinky he often seems most tender. His poems recognize, and help us recognize, the inherent harm in what we hold dear, defend and even worship.”
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