The Talented Miss Highsmith
by Joan Schenkar
(St. Martin’s, $40)
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Raymond Carver
by Carol Sklenicka
(Scribner, $35)
Raymond Carver’s life “reads like a Raymond Carver story,” said David Wiegand in the San Francisco Chronicle. “There’s no easy answer to the question of why Carver felt so haunted all his life,” or why he drank heavily until he was 40, but this “exhaustive and definitive” new biography paints the sawmill worker’s son as a classic outsider. Before his death, at 50, of lung cancer, Carver did find a measure of peace, but his is still a sad tale.
Literary Life
by Larry McMurtry
(Simon & Schuster, $24)
This second memoir from the novelist Larry McMurtry is “the kind of
slipshod book” that’s appealing because a reader has to hunt for
its best parts, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. McMurtry has decided to write his life story as a trilogy, but “his heart isn’t in it; not even next door.” His appealingly “crotchety outsider Texas persona” buys him a lot of goodwill, though—enough that you’re pleased just to happen upon a lazy anecdote, say, about taking Susan Sontag to a stock car race.
Too Much Money
by Dominick Dunne
(Crown, $26)
Dominick Dunne’s “transparently autobiographical” posthumous novel proves a “fun romp” through the high-society world he knew so well, said Craig Wilson in USA Today. Though it’s no surprise to hear that rich New Yorkers are “mean, manipulative, and spoiled,” Dunne fans will be interested to see his fictional alter ego navigate feuds with a billionaire heiress and a disgraced former U.S. congressman.