Books: New Murakami, after ‘The Girl on the Train,’ a forgotten surrealist and more
I’m back! I’m Carolyn Kellogg, books editor of the L.A. Times, returning after a few staycation days away. We have some delightful book reviews for you this week. …
THE BIG STORY
Haruki Murakami is a literary phenomenon, a bestselling author in Japan as well as one of the world’s most beloved innovative novelists. But his new book, “Men Without Women,” isn’t a novel at all; it’s short stories. Do his tales of alienated men (and, often, cats) work as short fiction? Find out in our review from Jeffrey Renard Allen, the acclaimed novelist and award-winning short story writer.
AFTER ‘THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN’
Paula Hawkins had a worldwide bestseller on her hands with “The Girl on the Train,” which she has now followed up with “Into the Water,” another thriller with all new characters and a new setting. “I know a lot of people struggle when they are writing something on the back of a big success,” she tells the Times. “But actually, the pressure to write the book — that came from myself.” Find out about her new book in this interview with Lauren Christensen.
AN OVERLOOKED SURREALIST GENIUS
If you don’t recognize the name Leonora Carrington, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Best known as the lover and muse of painter Max Ernst, Carrington had a long, full creative life in her own right, as both an author and artist. Two new books shine a much-deserved spotlight on Carrington. Joy Press, our former book editor, returns to our pages writing about Carrington’s startlingly original short fiction, collected by the independent press Dorothy in “The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington,” along with her life and harrowing escape from Europe during World War II as described in her memoir from NYRB Classics, “Down Below.”
BESTSELLERS
Books on women and politics are hot this week. Debuting at No. 1 on our nonfiction bestseller list is “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign” by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, two national correspondents who saw a dysfunctional presidential campaign and flawed candidate. Whether that’s selling big with people who also saw Clinton has flawed, or those who had pinned their hopes on her winning the presidency and want to know what happened is hard to say. But it’s clear that hopeful, politically engaged readers across the southland are in a book-buying mood: Elizabeth Warren’s call to action, “This Fight Is Our Fight,” debuts at No. 3 on the nonfiction list.
Additionally, the paperback edition of “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood has popped up at No. 2 on the paperback bestseller list (her dystopian vision of women being disempowered by a male political elite is still, as yet, classified as fiction).
MORE REVIEWS
Writing in a variety of forms and with ferocious precision, Oglala Sioux writer Layli Long Soldier uses the grit between the definitions of words in her language and in English to make poems that are transparent on the history of American Indians, writes John Freeman in our review of her collection “Whereas.”
Colin Dickey reviews “Built on Bones: 15,000 Years of Urban Life and Death,” by bioarcheologist Brenna Hassett, whose studies explain how we’ve come to live and die in cities over the ages.
BOOK NEWS
Author Jean Stein, known for the oral history “Edie” and who came from a storied Los Angeles family, died Monday. The Times’ Carolina Miranda, who worked closely with Stein after the L.A. riots, has this appreciation.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson has landed a two-book deal worth eight figures with Threshold Editions, a conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster.
Jane Goodall had a few words for Ivanka Trump when she discovered that she’d been quoted in Trump’s book, “Women Who Work,” without being consulted. The dedicated environmentalist said, “I was not aware of this, and have not spoken with her, but I sincerely hope she will take the full import of my words to heart.” In the past, Goodall has compared Donald Trump’s behavior to that of chimpanzees.
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