Our recommended fiction this week includes a couple of story collections from writers who have long deserved wider recognition — the late Canadian author and musician Steven Heighton, who died last year at 60, and the playfully speculative writer Kelly Link, whose new book offers skewed riffs on traditional fairy tales. Also up: a satire of the publishing world, an ensemble portrait of young adulthood in Iowa City and a debut novel about a British transplant to Berlin.
In nonfiction, we recommend Rachel Louise Snyder’s memoir about coming to terms with a strict and unconventional childhood, Manuel Betancourt’s essay collection about society’s views of masculinity, and two books about racial violence separated by nearly a century: Victor Luckerson’s “Built From the Fire,” about Tulsa’s race massacre in 1921 and its aftermath, and Joe Sexton’s “The Lost Sons of Omaha,” about two deaths connected to a 2020 protest in Nebraska. They take stories you might think you know from the news, and go deep into the context and the complicated lives behind them. Happy reading.
—Gregory Cowles
After her mother’s death when she was 8, Snyder endured a strict evangelical upbringing on pain of physical punishment. At 16, she was kicked out of the house. Her memoir recounts a premature coming-of-age, when necessity forced her to gain independence while knowing nothing about actual freedom.
Set in an Iowa City where sex, drugs and opinions about poetry are plentiful, as students and townies mingle uneasily, this novel circles a hothouse of young people on the brink of transplantation into the harsh outside world.
Riverhead | $28
In 2020, Jake Gardner shot and killed a man named James Scurlock at a protest against racism; after he was indicted for the death later that year, Gardner killed himself. Sexton, a former Times reporter and editor, wades through conflicting accounts to seek the truth about a complicated and tragic episode.
Scribner | $30
This ambitious history, by a journalist based in Tulsa, provides an authoritative account of the prosperous Black neighborhood decimated by the city’s 1921 race massacre and a gripping portrait of the community resurrected in its aftermath.
In these essays, Betancourt dives into the paradoxes of masculinity, intertwining concepts of manhood with stories from his own life to examine paradigms of gender, desire and more.
Catapult | $26
Kuang’s first foray outside of the fantasy genre is breezy and propulsive: a thrilling, searing tale about a white woman who achieves tremendous literary success by stealing the manuscript of her recently deceased Asian friend’s unpublished novel and passing it off as her own.
Setton’s suspenseful debut is narrated by a jobless and not entirely honest 26-year-old who’s just moved to Germany from London. When a window in her apartment shatters one night, she is left terrified by the dangers of being a young woman isolated in her own mind.
Penguin Books | Paperback, $17
Heighton, who died last year at 60, draws on our most vulnerable moments in this moving collection, full of understated tension and exacting detail. The characters feel both recognizable and one-of-a-kind.
Biblioasis | Paperback, $22.95
Each of the stories here alludes to a classic fairy tale, putting Link’s singular imagination on view. A woman falls in love with a ghost; a tech billionaire sends his three sons on a quest for a tiny dog, promising the winner his fortune.
