A Friend of the Familyby Lauren Grodstein
A gripping, elegant account of fatherly love and suburban sanctity gone awry.
In this American Beauty-esque tale of love and tragedy in suburbia, Lauren Grodstein charts the missteps and redemption of a small family whose suburban sanctity is threatened in unexpected ways. Pete is an accomplished middle-class doctor and father whose life is a liberal, pre-packaged version of success, complete with a lucrative medical practice, loving wife and son, and a nice house in New Jersey—a life O: The Oprah Magazine calls “a persuasive indictment of a certain kind of privileged narrow-mindedness…” Things go awry when Peter’s son Alec drops out of his liberal arts college and becomes enamored with Laura, a spellbinding older woman whose unspeakable past threatens his future. The course of the entire family’s life changes as a result of the relationship and the threat Peter believes Laura poses, and Pete is forced to put his fatherly love to unimagined tests. “What Grodstein captures so strikingly is the anxiety of a father’s love, that aching affection that can flip in a moment of panicked disappointment to full-blown disgust,” writes The Washington Post. The Daily Beast featured A Friend of the Family in its gallery of the best books of fall.
Sicilian Tragedeeby Ottavio Cappellani
Star-crossed Sicilian lovers mix with mobsters in a “full-throttle comedy.”
NPR’s Fresh Air calls Cappellani’s comic a “Tarantino-style operetta, part soap opera” an “exuberant crime novel with a plot as twisty, one might say, as a plate of linguine… a black comic explosion of plots and counterplots, murders and reprisals.” Set in Cappellani’s native Sicily, the novel revolves around two couples: Alfio and Betty and Tino and Bobo, star-crossed lovers in the middle of a production of Romeo and Juliet. Mix in mobsters, aristocrats, politicians, and assassins and you get a “poison-pen valentine” that The New York Times Book Review dubs “full-throttle comedy with a bitter edge. It’s only after the laughter stops that you smell the gunpowder.
How to Relax Without Getting the Axe: A Survival Guide to the New Workplaceby Stanley Bing
A recession-proof satire of American corporate jungle.
Stanley Bing may hate working, but not enough to stop writing books about the subject. Bing, the pen name of Gil Schwartz, CBS’ executive vice president of corporate communications, is offering How to Relax Without Getting the Axe: A Survival Guide to the New Workplace as a reworked paperback version of his seminal tome on executive life, Executricks, or How to Retire While You’re Still Working, auspiciously released just before the recession hit America a year and a half ago. The ultimate corporate America satirist, Bing offers advice on how to succeed in business without really trying. Using the key skills of delegation, absence, abuse of status, decisiveness, and engagement, Bing gives a humorous take on thriving in a failing economy. As the New York Post writes, “Nobody pricks corporate balloons better than Stanley Bing.”
Yours Ever: People and Their Lettersby Thomas Mallon
One of our sharpest critics investigates the glorious lost art of letter writing.
Yours Ever’s carefully compiled selection of written communications is an exploration of the loss of letter writing in the face of the onslaught of email, Twitter, and instant messaging. Arranged by categories like “Friendship,” “Advice,” “Complaint,” “Love,” and “Confession,” Mallon’s ode to the written word focuses on the past, chronicling the correspondence of historical figures such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, cataloguing the musings of Flannery O’Connor, and bringing news from the court of Louis XIV in what Booklist calls “an eloquent tribute to an endangered form of communication.” Mallon’s analysis is weaved throughout, and he “adroitly distills each correspondent’s purpose while placing it in a greater thematic context.” From travel bulletins and suicide notes to fan mail and personal letters, Mallon’s own collection of letters began all the way back when “a first-class stamp cost 29 cents,” as Mallon puts it. Says Publishers Weekly: “This smart, witty, and lively account with excerpts of a not-yet-extinct literary genre will whet our appetites for published collections of letters.”
Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?by Michael J. Sandel
A Harvard law professor navigates the nearly inscrutable meaning of justice.
If stranded on a sinking life boat, could one justify throwing one person overboard to save the lives of two, or even three? That’s the line of questioning Michael J. Sandel poses in his new book, a philosophy primer of sorts, adapted from his popular Harvard undergraduate classroom lectures. From Benthem to Mills to Rawls, Sandel explores the basic moral questions we confront in our daily lives. Sandel touches on everything from government bailouts to reparations for slavery, and how to mete out justice in such difficult cases. “Sandel’s routine is to present us with a problem, help us identify the principles we appeal to in assessing our options and then show us how hard it can be to get them to line up and point in the same direction,” writes The Guardian. Though sometimes the Harvard professor trips into jargon, ultimately, writes The Seattle Times, “For those seeking a short course through moral philosophy from a witty writer, fast on his feet, and nimble with his pen, this thin volume is difficult to beat.”
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