It's a fun fact that Zadie Smith and Susan Straight, two boldface names in literary fiction over the past quarter-century, both live in the neighborhoods where they were raised. Smith returned to northwest London after some sojourns abroad, while Straight has remained in Riverside, Calif.; both are now but a stone's throw from the scenes of their childhood.
Both authors also have new books out this week. Smith's essay collection and Straight's novel lead a batch of publishing highlights that also includes a biography, a memoir, a western of sorts, and another return home in Catherine Newman's sequel to Sandwich.
Thomas Wolfe, eat your heart out: Turns out you can go home again. Just as long as you're willing to face what waits for you there.
Tom's Crossing, by Mark Z. Danielewski
Typically known for his typographical gymnastics, Danielewski plays it comparatively straight with this tale of a horse theft gone wrong. But boy, this western-horror hybrid is still a lot. It feels apt to describe Tom's Crossing, which is nearly as long as War and Peace, the way Henry James once described Tolstoy's epic: It's a "loose, baggy monster." Or less delicately, it's a fat bear in early autumn — you know, the one preparing for hibernation? Filled with detail and cowboy affect, a bit ungainly in unaccustomed girth, this book, like that bear, is still capable of unspeakable horrors. Underestimate its sanguinary streak at your own peril.
Wreck, by Catherine Newman
Newman's third novel in as many years is her first to feature a returning cast: Rocky and her family, whom readers met last year in Sandwich. Maureen Corrigan of Fresh Air described that book, the story of a Cape Cod vacation gone tragicomically sideways, as "my idea of the perfect summer novel: shimmering and substantive." Wreck finds that family two years after that trip, back at home and approaching something that resembles normality — but of course, don't expect that kind of stability to last.
Sacrament, by Susan Straight
The bard of Riverside revisits some characters from her previous book, 2022's Mecca. This time, the city just east of Los Angeles is in the throes of an early COVID-19 surge, and her focus is on a group of nurses who are treating its victims, living separate from their families out of fear of contagion. This isn't just a COVID novel; it's also a chance to observe the impact of this singular moment on a community that has become synonymous with Straight, who has described Riverside as "my destiny. It's what I'm here to write about."
Dead and Alive: Essays, by Zadie Smith
Smith's last essay collection was her own COVID-19 book — reflections on the strange new world the pandemic had ushered in, written and published during lockdown in 2020. Since then, she has hardly been dormant. The past five years have seen the prolific Brit produce a novel, a stage adaptation of Chaucer, several children's books and a review of the film Tar that earned her a Pulitzer Prize nod. That piece, "The Instrumentalist," is included in her new collection, along with more than two dozen other works of nonfiction from the past decade.
The Uncool: A Memoir, by Cameron Crowe
"I do not feel cool," Crowe told NPR in 2022. Perhaps that's a surprising sentiment from a man who has led an objectively glamorous life — first as a teenage music journalist, then as the filmmaker behind a handful of Hollywood dreamboats, in movies such as Say Anything… and Jerry Maguire. But don't call it false modesty; he's convinced of that frank self-assessment enough to have adapted it for the title of his new memoir. The book promises to elaborate on the real events that inspired Almost Famous, his semiautobiographical cult classic and its recent Broadway adaptation.
A Dream Deferred, by Abby Philip
In a conversation with NPR's Weekend Edition, the CNN anchor explained the reason for her new biography: "Because a lot of people think of Rev. Jackson today as a civil rights leader, as an activist, they kind of skip completely over this extraordinary chapter" — his career as a politician. The book takes a wide view, including a glimpse of his troubled family life as a child and reflections on his legacy, but it's especially concerned with Jackson's pair of presidential campaigns in the 1980s.
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