Welcome to the next page! I am very happy to see you here. I’m Constance Grady, a book reviewer for Vox.
Between the avalanche of new releases released every month and the massive back catalog of existing books, it can be difficult for readers to sort through the chaos. This is why this newsletter exists. Each month, I’ll send you book recommendations, both old and new, to help you find your next great read. I will also include some fun bits from the literary world.
If you want to see these recommendations delivered directly to your inbox, Consider membership. Even if you want to more recommendation, Consider becoming a Vox member. You’ll get exclusive access to a special edition of Ask a Book Critic once a month, where I’ll offer members personalized book recommendations. email me constance.grady@vox.com With your willingness to read, and I may answer them in the next member email.
With that, let’s get into the books.
from Death of Alice Munro Last month, I read again beggar maidHis 1987 novel-in-story, and thinking about what a perfect book it is
The novel-in-story form is perhaps one of the most beautiful variations of the novel, and it is a structure that Munro invented and mastered. It means a collection of short stories featuring the same characters which, when compiled into a single volume, becomes a longer narrative about them. You might think of Jennifer Egan here A visit from the goon squad or of Sandra Cisneros House on Mango Street.
inside beggar maid (Published outside the United States What do you think of yourself?), short stories about Rose, a bright and awkward girl growing up in small-town Canada, and her stepmother Flo, who Rose both admires and is ashamed of. You follow Rose from her clumsy childhood to her glamorous adulthood, watching her life as it is informed by the poor small town she left behind. Each story in the cycle is its own, isolated and sparkling like a pearl, and then Munro combines them into something new like the beads of a necklace.
If you haven’t read Munro before, beggar maid A good place to start. If you want to read something else, let’s see what we can do for you.
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The Virgin in the Garden By AS Byatt
While we’re on the subject of memorizing lessons! A few months ago we also Dr Lost AS Byattits author Possession And a long standing favorite of mine. Byatt, who was also an English professor, primarily wrote novels about academics. He had a keen sense of the joy of reading and analyzing a text and an impeccable eye for writing about color. Byatt novels are always decorated with descriptions of peacock greens and deep rich crimsons and shadowy mauve, so that reading them feels like standing under a stained glass window.
Byatt is best known for winning the Booker Prize PossessionBut the book of hers that has spoken to me most recently is her 1978 novel The Virgin in the Garden. It’s about a family of academics, very clever and varying degrees of unhappiness, who prepare to put on a play about Queen Elizabeth I to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Its great joy for me is Frederica, the youngest daughter in the family, bursting with glee at her own scholarly wit. There is no one else in fiction like him.
You dream of empire By Alvaro Enrig, translated by Natasha Wimmer
It’s an absolute wonder of a new novel by Alvaro Enrique, a Mexican institution but whose work has only recently become available to English-language readers. (You dream of empire Enrique’s third book to be published in English.) It takes place over the course of one day in 1519, when the Spanish conquistador Cortes arrives at the royal palace of Moctezuma in what is now Mexico City.
Cortes’ soldiers are ragged and dirty, “provincials, nobodys, hicks”, who are fixated on “rotten fruit juice brought from their own land”. The Tenochtitláns (rendered to the Aztecs by the uncivilized Spanish), by contrast, were fabulously wealthy, the seat of a vast empire, and rich in wonders like quilts, grasshopper tacos, and magic mushrooms. (Moctezuma spends much of his page time tripping over this novel.) We know how the story ends — but in Enrig’s playful, hallucinatory prose, things seem entirely possible to go in different directions.
Ministry of Time By Kalyan Bradley
Ministry of Time This was an incredibly satisfying read, which I couldn’t put down. Released last month, it takes place in a near-future London where the British government has developed time travel technology. To test this, they brought humans out of the historical death trap and into the present moment. Our unnamed narrator is a government bureaucrat who hires a time traveler as his live-in companion to help him adjust to the present. Of course they fall in love, but there is more to it than that.
Mention of Narrator Graham Greene’s mid-century wartime spy novels abound, and that’s pretty much the best comparison for this book. Think: smoke-filled rooms full of intrigue, hard-won friendships that are all the more precious for existing in such desperate times, a hero who is never as innocent as he chooses to believe himself to be. To that mix, Bradley adds a sophisticated exploration of time travel, romance, and the way postcolonialism shapes our minds. I gobbled up this book in a few days. You will, too.
off the shelf
In The New Yorker, Katy Waldman Explores what Covid has done to fiction.
dracula It is an epistolary novel composed of dated diary entries, letters and newspaper clippings. This is the delightful Substack Sends excerpts from the book to your inbox on the dates mentioned in the original story.
In an increase that will surprise none of us who have gone after school libraries Now going after the public library, too.
A Question Advice column was created for: I should warn my family about the sex scenes In my book?
In The Paris Review, Lucy Schiller Internet explores the strange formality of prose.
BookTok is not really a community Driven by fans, writers, influencers or even publishers, argues Jezebel.
