Recommended Books

The Storm Is Here: An American Crucible
Author:
Luke Mogelson
ISBN 13:
978-0593489215
The New Yorker 's award-winning war correspondent returns to his own country to chronicle its accelerating civic breakdown, in an indelible eyewitness narrative of startling explanatory power After years of living abroad and covering the Global War on Terrorism, Luke Mogelson went home in early 2020 to report on the social discord that the pandemic was bringing to the fore across the US. An assignment that began with right-wing militias in Michigan soon took him to an uprising for racial justice in Minneapolis, then to antifascist clashes in the streets of Portland, and ultimately to an attempted insurrection in Washington, D.C. His dispatches for The New Yorker revealed a larger story with ominous implications for America. They were only the beginning. This is the definitive eyewitness account of how—during a season of sickness, economic uncertainty, and violence—a large segment of Americans became convinced of the need to battle against dark forces plotting to take their country away from them. It builds month by month, through vivid depictions of events on the ground, from the onset of COVID-19 to the attack on the US Capitol—during which Mogelson followed the mob into the Senate chamber—and its aftermath. Bravely reported and beautifully written, The Storm Is Here is both a unique record of a pivotal moment in American history and an urgent warning about those to come.

Sugar Street
Author:
Jonathan Dee
ISBN 13:
978-0802160003
“This propulsive and furious book is as fun to read as it is relentless and unsparing. Deranged and faltering America, Jonathan Dee has your number.” —Joshua Ferris, author of The Dinner Party In Jonathan Dee’s elegant and explosive new novel, Sugar Street , an unnamed male narrator has hit the road. Rid of any possible identifiers, his possessions amount to $168,548 in cash stashed in an envelope under his car seat. Vigilantly avoiding security cameras, he drives until he hits a city where his past is unlikely to track him down, and finds a room to rent from a less-than-stable landlady whose need for money outweighs her desire to ask questions. He seems to have escaped his former self. But can he? In a story that moves with swift dark humor and insight, Dee takes us through his narrator’s attempt to disavow his former life of privilege and enter a blameless new existence. Having opted out of his material possessions and human connections, the pillars of his new self - simplicity, kindness, above all invisibility - grow shakier as he butts up against the daily lives of his neighbors in their politically divided working-class city. With the suspense of a crime thriller and the grace of our best literary fiction, Dee unspools the details of our unlikely hero’s former life and his developing new one in a drumbeat roll up to a shocking final act. Dee has been compared by the Wall Street Journal to authors such as Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Egan for his expansive, contemporary, social novels; Sugar Street is a leaner, more personal, but still uncannily timely look at the volatile America of today. A risky, engrossing and surprisingly visceral story about a white man trying to escape his own troubling footprint and start his life over.

Marlena: A Novel
Author:
Julie Buntin
ISBN 13:
978-1250160157
A National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize Finalist Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize Named a Best Book of the Year by Vogue , BuzzFeed , The Washington Post , Esquire , Harper's Bazaar , NPR , NYLON , Huffington Post, Kirkus Reviews , Barnes & Noble Chosen for the Book of the Month Club, Nylon Book Club, and Belletrist Book Club Named an Indie Next Pick and a Barnes and Noble Discover Pick Everything about fifteen-year-old Cat’s new town in rural Michigan is lonely and off-kilter until she meets her neighbor, the manic, beautiful, pill-popping Marlena. Cat is quickly drawn into Marlena’s orbit and as she catalogues a litany of firsts―first drink, first cigarette, first kiss, first pill―Marlena’s habits harden and calcify. Within a year, Marlena is dead, drowned in six inches of icy water in the woods nearby. Now, decades later, Cat must try again to move on, even as the memory of Marlena calls her back. Told in a haunting dialogue between past and present, Marlena is the captivating story of an intoxicating, indelible friendship that does not flinch from the resonant effects of its loss.