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by Max Barry (Penguin, $27)
Max Barry has taken the power of words to a deadly new level, said Graham Sleight in The Washington Post. In Barry’s “extremely slick” thriller, an elite group of wordsmiths is trained outside Washington, D.C., to commandeer people’s minds through language. Readers may struggle early on to follow dueling plots about a girl recruit and a boy fleeing the organization. But Barry’s “corrosive wit” and insights about coercion make his book, “for all its chases and guns,” morally probing.
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William Shakespeare’s Star Wars
by Ian Doescher (Quirk, $15)
This literary mashup from a young Shakespeare fan “will likely go down in history as more of a quirky addition to the genre-busting canon than a classic,” said Maricela Gonzalez in Entertainment Weekly. A version of the original Star Warsstory told as if Shakespeare had created Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker and scripted their lines in verse, it offers “some delightfully meta moments.” Even so, the story just isn’t gripping enough without the visual thrills of light-saber duels and laser battles.
The Humans
by Matt Haig (Simon & Schuster, $25)
Matt Haig isn’t the first author to use a narrator from outer space to have fun deconstructing humans’ strange ways, said Harry Ritchie in The Guardian (U.K.). But while the conceit isn’t new, Haig “uses it superbly” in this wry tale about an intergalactic traveler who assassinates a professor, inhabits his body, and then goes soft before completing his mission. “It’s a mark of how funny and clever the rest of his novel is” that Haig “just about gets away” with getting a bit mushy himself.
This Is How You Die
(Grand Central, $18)
It’s “no particular surprise” that the creators of the self-published best seller Machine of Death have released a sequel, said Tasha Robinson in the A.V. Club. What’s remarkable about this anthology of stories—all submitted by online readers of Dinosaur Comics—is that it’s better still. Again, each tale is premised on the notion that a device has been invented that predicts how each user will die. But where previous stories relied on “O. Henry–style twists,” these branch out in rewarding new directions.
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Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
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Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
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The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
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Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
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Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
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Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”