Gypsy Boy
by Mikey Walsh (Thomas Dunne, $25)
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Unorthodox
by Deborah Feldman (Simon & Schuster, $23)
Deborah Feldman’s memoir reads like “one of the darker Grimms’ fairy tales,” said Marion Winik in Newsday. Abandoned by her mother, Feldman grew up under a series of “twisted caregivers” as a free-spirited girl chafing under the rules and customs of a Hasidic Jewish sect in Brooklyn. After an arranged marriage that led to more misery, Feldman ultimately liberated herself, starting a new life and promising her son she’d never again stay silent. “Let’s hope she never does.”
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
by Jeanette Winterson (Grove, $25)
It’s unlikely that novelist Jeanette Winterson could imagine a villain as cruel as her adoptive mother, said Sarah Barmak in the Toronto Globe and Mail. When she wasn’t locking Winterson in a coal bin, this gun-toting terror was reminding the girl that “the devil led us to the wrong crib.” Though Winterson’s first memoir is sometimes self-pitying, it offers a touching story about how books saved her life, how literature can be a child’s lifeline.
At Last
by Edward St. Aubyn (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25)
With At Last, Edward St. Aubyn brings “a remarkable cycle of novels” to a close, said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. In previous books, the aristocratic author’s stand-in, Patrick Melrose, overcame sexual abuse by his father and heroin addiction. Here, the character finds a measure of peace. For those new to the series: Imagine “one of Evelyn Waugh’s wicked satires mashed up with a searing memoir of abuse, and injected with Proustian meditations on the workings of memory and time.”
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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.”