by Naoise Dolan
When is a rom-com not a rom-com? When it's written by Irish novelist Naoise Dolan (Exciting Times). Her word-perfect sophomore effort, The Happy Couple, contains the requisite romance and comedy, but unlike a traditional rom-com, it carries an element of actual suspense as the couple's fate seems not preordained but truly precarious.
The halves of the nominal couple are Celine, a 26-year-old concert pianist who teaches to make ends meet, and Luke, a 28-year-old communications strategist at a tech firm. They
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by Willie Lin
The 39 poems in Willie Lin's graceful debut, Conversation Among Stones, adopt the language of art, nature, and religion while musing on belonging and fate.
Lin, a Kundiman Fellow born in Beijing and now based in Chicago, commemorates Tiananmen Square in "Brief History of Exile," in which a man sees "the afterimage of the night sky burning/ from his room by the bridge, the tanks and young men/ riding into the city square at last...." The notion of exile is a link to the exquisite ekphrastic poem "After Masaccio's
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by Janet Fox, illus. by Jasu Hu
Janet Fox's second picture book, Wintergarden, is a lyrically hopeful story about a young girl who learns nurturing green-thumb lessons from her patient mother. Artist Jasu Hu augments Fox's smooth text with exquisite spreads created with watercolor, pencil, and mixed media, resulting in synchronous perfection.
"In winter/ when it snows/ my mama grows/ a garden," Fox's idyll opens. While soft flakes swirl beyond the apartment windows, mother and child ready the kitchen windowsill with green pots. The girl
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by Jeff Tweedy
Jeff Tweedy (How to Write One Song), who has been making music for decades, has countless fans who know he can write songs that speak to them on many levels. He and his band Wilco have written some of the most beautiful songs of the last quarter century. In World Within a Song, his third book, Tweedy takes his readers on a beautiful, effervescent, and introspective journey, describing 50 songs that have, in one way or another, shaped him as a musician and that "have taught me about how to be human." Sandwiched
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by Nathalie Herschdorfer
Deborah Turbeville (1932-2013) made her living--and her name--as a fashion photographer. Yet is there a photographer whose style seems less suited to the glossies? The monograph Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage by Nathalie Herschdorfer fulsomely celebrates this seeming contradiction and seeks to place Turbeville not only among her better-known fellow fashion photogs (Helmut Newton, Irving Penn) but among the finest photographers of her generation.
Herschdorfer (Body) bundles Turbeville's work into five sections
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