OLGA DIES DREAM, by Xochitl Gonzalez. (Flatiron, $27.99.) Liberation takes center stage in this debut novel about a wedding planner who is the daughter of a revolutionary. Gonzalez’s thoughtful story grapples with questions of how to break free from a mother’s manipulations, from shame, from pride indistinguishable from fear, from abandonment, from oppression and from greed. “What exactly is the American dream these days?” writes Maggie Shipstead in her review. ‘It’s worth wondering what exactly we should dream of. Olga Acevedo, the title character in Xochitl Gonzalez’s debut novel, ‘Olga Dies Dreaming’, struggles immensely with this question.”
HYMNE, by Noah Hawley. (Grand Central, $29.) In his sixth novel, which depicts an epidemic of teen suicides in the years after Covid subsided, Hawley (also the showrunner of the hit TV series “Fargo”) addresses our existential anxiety about the fragility of adolescent mental health. , and channels it into a hefty page-turner that is equally gruesome, catastrophic, and entertaining. “When he talks about Hawley’s talents as a screenwriter, his dialogue brings the characters to life. Time and again the exchanges are humorous, sad and revealing,” writes S. Kirk Walsh in her review. Hawley’s concerns as a father form the basis of this thick, pyrotechnic novel, adding depth and meaning to the dramatic violence and outcome. Instead of victimizing the teens, Hawley gives them agency and power in a collapsing world.”
MRS PALFREY IN THE CLAREMONT, by Elizabeth Taylor. (New York Review Books, paper, $15.95.) Taylor’s penultimate novel, originally published in 1971, follows elderly people who spend their retirement in a residential hotel. A portrait of Britain at the end of the Empire, with an abysmal capacity for the hilarious and ridiculous, it cements Taylor’s place among the best fictional minds of her generation. “Possessed the quality of total composure and attention—so that the whole is present in every part of any given book—Taylor was a novelist from the tips of her fingers to the depths of her brain,” writes Geoff Dyer in his review. “Was there” each better chronicler of English life as it unfolded in the 30-year period after the end of the Second World War?”
EMOTIONAL: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking, by Leonard Mlodinow. (Pantheon, $28.95.) Mlodinow’s stimulating new book cleverly explores the ways emotions affect our thinking, with compelling examples and attention to the latest research. “Since mind, brain and body are one, it is impossible to disentangle our vaunted rationality from the emotions,” writes Frans de Waal in his review. “Mlodinow takes a sharp approach to this subject. … He writes in a smooth, friendly style that easily draws you in and makes you think about both the anecdotes told and your own way of dealing with similar situations.”
CALL ME CASSANDRA, by Marcial Gala. Translated by Anna Kushner. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) The young narrator of this novel has believed from childhood that he is Cassandra, the Trojan priestess whose prophecies are not followed. Alternating the hero’s difficult adolescence in 1970s Cuba with his military service in Angola, Gala paints a terrifying picture of an outsider in the wrong body. Marcela Valdes, who reviews the book, calls it a “stunning” novel: “Gala, deftly pushing the boundaries of both realism and first-person perspective, makes it impossible for the reader to determine whether Raúl/Cassandra is truly supernatural.” or that the character’s visions are a Mittyish response to the many humiliations and cruelties he/she has to endure.”
JIM HARRISON: Complete Poems, edited by Joseph Bednarik. (Copper Canyon, $40.) Harrison, famous for his fiction, was also a poet with a prodigious appetite. Pleasure and mortality are the twin themes of this gargantuan and expansive collection, spanning his career from his 1965 debut to his death in 2016. Recognizing the cost of pleasure, and its ultimate ephemerality, is the inevitable downside of Harrison’s celebratory hedonism,” writes Troy Jollimore in his review. “American approaches to the spiritual have always emphasized the physical, either by attempting to purify the body or by embracing its lusts and limitations. Harrison takes the second way, reminding us, as the Christian mystics liked to do, that all that is sacred and sacred must be material and encased in order to enter our lives.”