Year Million
edited by Damien Broderick
(Atlas & Co., $16)
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In the distant future, don’t expect humans to be exploring deep space Star Trek–style, said Brett Levy in the Los Angeles Times. If there’s any consensus among the futurists who contributed 14 “overlapping” essays to Year Million, it’s that a human consciousness will someday be reducible to software that can be uploaded to a massive supercomputer in the sky. “It would be nice to report” that such speculation “provides a fun escape.” Unfortunately, future worries will be massive, as well.
True Crime
edited by Harold Schechter
(Library of America, $40)
No one should be surprised that reading about a 1651 hanging or a 19th-century ax murder can be “almost obscenely entertaining,” said Patrick Anderson in The Washington Post. But this anthology of American true-crime writing has a “searching” quality that makes it more than mere rubbernecking. “Exceptionally well-crafted” contributions from the likes of Meyer Berger, Damon Runyon, and Zora Neale Hurston stand out.
The Anglo Files
by Sarah Lyall
(Norton, $25)
This “warm, blunt” field guide to the peculiarities of British life mostly trafficks in clichés, said Matt Weiland in The New York Times. Reporter Sarah Lyall expands upon the “companionable” dispatches to the Times that she has been filing from London since the mid-1990s, but she hardly gives readers any sense how the country has changed in that time. Even so, Lyall’s “joshing effort” to explain bad teeth, bad food, and hedgehog preservation societies offers plenty of amusement, and plenty of truths.
Minding the Store
edited by Robert Coles and Albert LaFarge
(New Press, $26)
You won’t find any paeans to capitalism in this otherwise impressive anthology, said Saul Rosenberg in The Wall Street Journal. Drawn from an ethics course that psychiatrist Robert Coles once taught at Harvard Business School, the collection instead uses business as a lens on human conundrums, and refreshes our appreciation for such old favorites as John O’Hara, Joseph Heller, Flannery O’Connor, and John Cheever.
