The Dog Stars
by Peter Heller (Knopf, $25)
Move over, Cormac McCarthy, said Ron Hogan in The Dallas Morning News. Like McCarthy’s The Road, Peter Heller’s debut novel takes an imagined postapocalyptic future and makes it “the stuff of top-shelf literary fiction.” Heller “brings us deep inside” the claustrophobic world of a pilot named Hig, who survived a global flu pandemic and now lives in an abandoned hangar with his dog and a prickly weapons expert. Frequently, this “poetic” novel reads “like a 19th-century frontier narrative.”
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The Last Policeman
by Ben H. Winters (Quirk, $15)
“No detective has ever felt smaller in the face of his fate than Hank Palace,” said Dan Kois in Slate.com. The hero of Ben Winters’s “funny, deeply wise” novel is a hard-boiled civil-service type doggedly investigating an insurance man’s death in New Hampshire even though an approaching asteroid will certainly wipe out Earth in six months. Palace is a great character, whose “looming problem is the same one we’ve been ignoring all our lives—that one day, we shall die.”
Skylark
by Meagan Spooner (Carolrhoda, $18)
Meagan Spooner’s debut novel for young readers is “like one of those over-too-soon carnival rides,” said Rollie Welch in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Spooner delivers “amped-up thrills, annoying lulls, and a rousing finale” in this tale of 16-year-old Lark, who lives in the aftermath of a devastating war and must escape a system in which the magical energy of youth is harnessed to power the world of adults. Though Lark initially defers to boys, she eventually finds her strength.
The Kill Order
by James Dashner (Delacorte, $18)
“Take a deep breath before you read any James Dashner book,” said Sharon Haddock in the Salt Lake City Deseret News. The prequel to Dashner’s best-selling Maze Runner young-adult trilogy doesn’t give readers much chance to relax as it follows a quartet of survivors trying to make sense of life after solar flares and disease bring humanity to the brink of extinction. Like the books in Dashner’s trilogy, The Kill Order is a “fast-paced, nerve-wracking read.”
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Should you add your child to your credit card?The Explainer You can make them an authorized user on your account in order to help them build credit
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Cracker Barrel crackup: How the culture wars are upending corporate brandingIn the Spotlight Is it 'woke' to leave nostalgia behind?
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'It's hard to discern what it actually means'Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
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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.”