Samuel Clemens' early resume is a scrap heap of hapless ambition. School, printing, riverboat piloting, soldiering, prospecting — for one reason or another, none of his motley pursuits ever seemed to last long or net much success for the restless Missourian. From one angle, it was a rather inauspicious start. From another, it's the stuff of American legend.
Clemens, of course, became Mark Twain — who, in turn, has become the subject of the latest biography from the foremost profiler of American iconoclasts. Ron Chernow's biographies of George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant and Alexander Hamilton, among others, have earned the historian a bevy of literary prizes and even a smash Broadway adaptation. Now, he's training his gaze on Twain's twisty path from elementary school dropout to Great American novelist and world-famous wit.
But Chernow's tome isn't alone on this week's publishing calendar. Get on your tiptoes to look past it — seriously, it's hefty — and you'll find reflections on life and art, the latest from a couple of beloved novelists, and Dave Barry, who has made quite a living off his wit, as well.
Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up, by Dave Barry
Barry is an institution. For decades the Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist has fired potshots at the inanities of modern life, from any number of vantage points: a syndicated column, dozens of books, even a rock band and short-lived TV adaptation. But there's a through-line to all of this, as the 77-year-old Barry explores in a new memoir that reaches all the way back to his earliest childhood: "In our house," Barry explained to NPR's Weekend Edition, "the rule was that you could make fun of everything, and in fact, you should. You should never take anything too seriously, and above all, you should never take yourself too seriously."
The Devil Three Times: A Novel, by Rickey Fayne
Fayne's debut novel does not lack for ambition. Beginning with a Faustian bargain between a woman on a slave ship and the devil, Fayne traces the fallout of this deal across the generations of her descendants that follow. This family history contains magic and despair, migrations and hauntings — and echoes of the country's complex, often painful racial history writ large.
The Emperor of Gladness, by Ocean Vuong
At once a poet and a novelist, a leading light of American letters and a Vietnamese immigrant who didn't learn English until he was 11, Vuong defies easy categorization. His books, whether they deploy line breaks or paragraphs, tend to root around among life's mundane intimacies for the profound truths of human connection. It's true here too in Vuong's second novel, the story of an unlikely bond between a depressed young man and an elderly widow struggling with dementia. Rather inclement soil for a budding friendship, you might say — but these mutual caretakers find promise amid all the problems.
Life and Art: Essays, by Richard Russo
Russo is best known for his fiction, which has won him a Pulitzer and a raft of dedicated readers. But in this collection of essays, he takes us beyond his novels' margins to, among other things, reflect on the real inspirations behind his art and what that art owes to its inspirations.
Mark Twain, by Ron Chernow
It's a monstrous good time for a body to take an interest in Twain. In recent years, the humorist has seen his life and books reinterpreted by a literary darling, a graphic novel, a work of scholarship — even by himself, in an autobiography that waited a century for publication. Now, one of our most celebrated biographers is taking his own swing at a life so full, lively and multifarious — dare I say — picaresque, it would not have been out of place in one of Twain's own novels.
Run for the Hills, by Kevin Wilson
Here's how Maureen Corrigan, longtime book critic for Fresh Air, once neatly summed up Wilson's "sweet-tart" fiction: "He'll start off with these goofy, almost sitcom-type contrived premises and from there create stories that knock you out with the force of their emotional truth." That description remains apt here. His newest novel features a literally found family of half-siblings, on a road trip to track down the deadbeat dad who fathered them all — and abandoned them each in turn.
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