Every month, Emma Alpern and Jasmine Vojdani recommend new fiction and nonfiction books. You should read as many of them as possible. See their picks from last month here.
The Mind Reels, by Fredrik deBoer
DeBoer’s first novel traces the mental history of Alice, who, when the book opens, is a freshman living in a college dorm where she “would first go insane.” At first, she has trouble completing her schoolwork, and her antics cause her new roommate to move out; later, she is startlingly productive, hardly sleeping, and shedding weight. Over the years, despite concerns about her behavior and her parents’ pleas to get help, Alice’s brushes with health-care professionals are unproductive until she is institutionalized. DeBoer, who has elsewhere written about his own battles with mental health, tells a gripping story about one young woman’s descent into illness. —Jasmine Vojdani
Shadow Ticket, by Thomas Pynchon
Shadow Ticket is Pynchon’s first book since 2013’s Bleeding Edge. At just under 300 pages, it’s a snappy novel about a private eye named Hicks McTaggart who works at the Unamalgamated Ops detective agency. There are motorcycles and fascist youths and a stage mentalist who teams up with Hicks for a while; there’s a thread about a cheese magnate. The story begins in Prohibition-era Milwaukee, where things are “jittery” because a bomb has just detonated. Then it’s off to New York, Tangier, Fiume, and eventually Hungary while Europe ramps up to World War II. As the plot bounces along and characters appear, step offstage, and reappear, things get strange, and reality flickers in and out to dazzling effect. —Emma Alpern
Next of Kin, by Gabrielle Hamilton
From the James Beard winner and former chef at Prune comes a second memoir, this one a searingly honest account of her family’s estrangement due in part to her brother’s suicide. The book opens with Hamilton making contact with her mother, after years of silence, during the fact-checking process on a piece she wrote for The New Yorker. Throughout, Hamilton is an assured storyteller: “There will be plenty of time up ahead to retrace the steps, to examine how a whole family is tugged asunder and shipwrecked — each of us like lost silver cutlery and bone china tableware, strewn across the ocean floor.” Next of Kin brims with razor-sharp insight and self-awareness. —JV
A Guardian and a Thief, by Megha Majumdar
After 2020’s A Burning, Majumdar’s second novel — a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award — tells the story of two families in a version of Kolkata, India, where the city’s food supply is disappearing and crime is spiking. Ma, her young daughter, and her father, Dadu, are a week out from joining Ma’s husband in Michigan, where he’s emigrated, when their food supply is raided and passports are stolen. In flashbacks, the book reveals what led the thief, a young man from outside of town named Boomba, to his state of desperation. Majumdar thrillingly and gracefully unveils how the fates of the two families are intertwined in order to reveal the many small thefts necessary to be a guardian. —J.V.
The Ten Year Affair, by Erin Somers
There have been a lot of books about divorce lately, and many others about open relationships. Why not straight-up infidelity? Somers’s second novel, which began as a short story in the magazine Joyland, takes the long view on a crush between new parents Cora and Sam, who live in a small city upstate. Each is in an unsatisfying marriage: Cora’s husband has a low libido, and Sam’s wife is a little mean. Their attraction is immediate, then immediately suppressed. But in an alternate reality — an evolving, detailed fantasy of sorts that Cora conjures alongside her real life — the version of Cora and Sam who went through with it have torrid sex, meet up repeatedly at a discreet local hotel, and keep it from their spouses for years. It’s hard to stop reading, and Somers has many tricks up her sleeve. —E.A.
Dead and Alive: Essays, by Zadie Smith
Written between 2016 and 2025, these often compelling essays are divided into five sections: Eyeballing, Considering, Reconsidering, Mourning, and Confessing. That means pieces on visual artists like Kara Walker and films like Tár, a memorial for Wolf Hall author Hilary Mantel, and a new essay about technology that is one of the book’s high points. In it, Smith, who doesn’t have a smartphone, lays out what she believes the algorithms of tech giants have done to us and thinks about how it compares to the nine or so hours a day she spent watching TV as a child. Smith leaves room for disagreement and still maintains her high-minded humanistic ideas. —E.A.
The Uncool, by Cameron Crowe
Before writing Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Almost Famous and Say Anything, Crowe was a mostly obedient younger brother growing up in the deserts of Southern California and, later, San Diego. His mother was an intelligent, domineering character; his sisters, one of whom had mental-health struggles that were mostly buried by the family, were at odds with the world around them. Crowe’s autobiography gets into his youthful attempts at journalism and proximity to fame, including the time he prank-called Cary Grant (who responded with “delicious good humor”) and Lucille Ball (who screamed at him). It’s deeper than the typical Hollywood memoir, as much about the fears and loneliness that defined those early years, what he describes as “an elemental, human ache,” as the people he brushed up against. —E.A.
Thomas Pynchon’s account of rising fascism, a millennial cheating novel, and a memoir from a James Beard winner.
