Lay the Favorite
by Beth Raymer
(Spiegel & Grau, $25)
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It’s no wonder that Beth Raymer was adored by the sketchy characters she met while working in the world of sports gambling, said Elizabeth Minkel in NewYorker.com. Raymer liked them back, no matter their faults, and she proved just as capable of “swindling and throwing money around carelessly.” She writes with true style and real energy, though, and when she takes up amateur boxing to blow off steam, “you can’t help but get in her corner.”
Wide Awake
by Patricia Morrisroe
(Spiegel & Grau, $25)
Even sleep-deprived readers who seek out Patricia Morrisroe’s memoir of insomnia might tire of her “brittle, not-quite-funny chirpiness,” said Robert Pinsky in The New York Times. But in chronicling her quest for a cure, the veteran magazine writer uncovers a lot of information and shines light on an important story: Whatever we mean by “a good night’s sleep,” our expectations are now manipulated by a drug industry that has a lot of money riding on the answer.
Never Tell Our Business to Strangers
by Jennifer Mascia
(Villard, $26)
Jennifer Mascia doesn’t yet have enough perspective to write about her parents’ criminal careers, said Zachary Lazar in Newsday. Only recently, as they were dying, did she learn that the shopping binges, bankruptcies, and abrupt cross-country moves of her childhood had been the result of family careers tied to murder and the mob. She tries to see her parents’ faults plainly, but her insistence that their love for her redeems them feels like “perfume covering a bad smell.”
Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man
by Bill Clegg
(Little, Brown, $24)
Former crack addict Bill Clegg never quite wound up in the gutter, said Liz Raftery in The Boston Globe. The successful young literary agent binged on rock cocaine while still solvent enough to afford $500-a-night hotel rooms and whatever booze bill arrived in the morning. But Clegg’s contribution to the addiction genre offers little else that’s distinctive. While his prose is “graceful and poetic,” the narrative he’s assembled is “manic and unfocused.” We see Clegg’s narcissism, but not much more.
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