FIRST PERSON ONLY: Stories† by Haruki Murakami. Translated by Philip Gabriel. (Vintage, 256 pp., $17.) In eight stories, Murakami’s classic first-person narrators meditate on music, sports, childhood memories and more, often balancing between realism and a deeper, philosophical wisdom. As our reviewer, David Means, noted, “this collection of cultures fuses, or maybe jumps over, defying time, throbbing like pop songs, hitting universal nerves.”
BEESWING: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice, 1967-1975† by Richard Thompson with Scott Timberg. (Algonquin, 304 pp., $16.95.) This “wry, non-heavy, anti-mandatory” memoir, as our reviewer, Paul Elie, put it, “vividly testifies” to Thompson’s journey as a folk musician, from his music with Fairport Convention and his first wife to his conversion to Islam.
GOLDENGRAVERS† by Sanjena Sathian. (Penguin, 352 pp., $17.) Set in the suburbs of Atlanta in the mid-2000s, this magical-realistic story follows an Indian-American teenager as he aimlessly navigates adolescence until a golden elixir binds him to his ancestors. “The tension Sathian builds is one of teen insecurity that swells into adulthood,” noted our reviewer, Lauren Christensen, “until disillusionment overthrows the tyranny of American perfectionism.”
BEES AND THE INSECTS THEY LOVE† by Frank Mortimer. (Citadel, 320pp., $15.95.) A beekeeper recounts his experience from novice to master, giving extensive advice and presenting the eccentrics, eccentrics and, as our reviewer, Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson, put it, “blatantly self-promoting windsocks” he encounters along the way.
