Criticism & Features

The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States by Walter Johnson (Harvard University Press) Gateway to the West. Point zero for Lewis and

This Is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope by Shayla Lawson (Harper Perennial) “The color of this book is Grace Jones / strapped into an electrical

The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s by Maggie Doherty (Knopf) Maggie Doherty’s group biography The Equivalents offers a thoughtful look at the underexamined

The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes by Zachary D. Carter (Random House) The Price of Peace is an ambitious, lucid biography of the

Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Picador) Is it better to read a few books many times, or more books only once? Replace

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne (Liveright) Forensic and poetic, The Dead Are Arising is a sweeping account of Malcolm X’s

Inside Story by Martin Amis (Knopf) “Fiction is freedom,” Martin Amis tells us repeatedly throughout his self-dubbed “novelised autobiography,” a supposed work of fiction with an index full of real

Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America by Wendy A. Woloson (University of Chicago Press) Part history, part sociology, with some firecracker economic insights to boot, Crap: A History

The Shore by Chris Nealon (Wave) Anti-capitalist poetry—arguably because it is itself the product of consumer capitalism—comes in an extravagant variety of flavors from the subversive head-trips of Allen Ginsberg

How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa (Little, Brown) Canadian poet Thammavongsa, born in Thailand and the daughter of Laotian refugees, makes her fiction debut with this Giller Prize-winning collection,