McNally Robinson NYC

by Benjamin Black
(Holtzbrink, $25.00)
This sequel to Christine Falls is as atmospheric and dark, dark, dark a story as its predecessor. Benjamin Black is actually John Banville, author of The Sea, a writer’s writer who is tackling the mystery genre. This book pulls you in with complicated characters, all machinating in gloomy 1950’s Dublin, and manages to be a crackling story as well as a bitter study of chances lost, and contentment squandered..

by Marguerite Duras
(W.W. Norton, $14.95)
Duras can lacerate with her words, even when she’s writing about love, so imagine how she writes about war, occupation, Holocaust and treachery. This is an account of her personal experiences, including waiting, almost dead with anxiety, to see if her husband would come home from a concentration camp. It is harrowing and, because it’s by Marguerite Duras, beautiful and unsettling..

by Aravind Adiga
(Simon and Schuster, $24.00)
A vivid, fast-paced look at class and caste in India, rollickingly related by a murderer you can’t help but root for. Delhi comes alive in his descriptions of it as a corrupt, depraved and fascinating city. As a card-carrying member of the oppressive upper classes, I got both thrills and chills, and predict that they’ll HATE this book back home..

by Sylvia Plath
(Harper Collins, $12.00)
Every poem in this book makes me feel like the top of my head is going to come off. No matter how often I read it. A burning, burning book..

by Jonathan Trouern-Trend
(Sierra Club Books, $9.95)
Trouern-Trend, an avid birdwatcher, went to Iraq as part of the US invasion and took his binoculars with him. This fascinating little book blends birding, war, and sociological observations with sharp little illustrations. Birds and war. A bee-eater on barbed wire. It’s both unsettling and hopeful..

by Les Beletsky
(Chronicle, $45.00)
Spring is here, and the birds are - ahem - bonking. This book lets you listen to recordings of them singing. It’s like a feathered World Music compilation. Find your nearest immigrant, play her a birdsong from her native land, and watch her swoon with nostalgia. The racket-tailed drongo had that effect on me. With this book, you get to look
at great pictures, listen to the sounds of the planet, and push nifty buttons. It’s perfect..

by Mischa Berlinski
(Holtzbrink, $14.00)
In which a hipster-ish young American goes to Thailand and gets sucked into the worlds of anthropologists and missionaries with the most remote villages and obscure tribes as backdrop. There’s a murder mystery, many entertaining anthropological digressions, even more entertaining insights into the minds of white missionaries among the heathens, and, beneath it all, some really good writing that makes you think even as you’re laughing..

by Michael Chabon
(HarperCollins, $12.95)
Rejoice, fellow Sherlock Holmes aficionados–he’s back. This tightly-written novella is a complete pleasure for the writing and story alone–who wouldn’t love a tale of a loquacious parrot, a bloody murder and a mysterious, little Holocaust survivor? As an added bonus, it involves the Great Man himself, grown old and decrepit but still up to his brilliant deductive tricks..

by Janisse Ray
(Milkweed Editions, $14.95)
“These are my people; our legacy is ruination.” Janisse Ray grew up in rural Georgia, literally dirt-poor. In this riveting memoir, she talks with great matter-of-factness and great poetry about the land, the forests, being part of a white family with a mentally ill father, and growing up in a junkyard. By the end of it, you can smell both the pine trees and the decomposing trash that were the landscapes of her youth. America is so much bigger than provincial little Manhattan..

by Irene Nemirovsky
(Random House, $22.00)
Another newly-discovered novel by the author of Suite Francaise. In this book, the doomed Nemirovsky (who died at Auschwitz, while her manuscript survived) draws us into the world of rural France between the two world wars. At one level the book is a real page-turner, with a most satisfying and tricky plot, and at another it is a beautiful, atmospheric rendition of a particular place, time, and mind-set..