Lest you forget that Zadie Smith’s output encompasses several masterful careers, please allow Feel Free (Penguin Press), her new collection of essays, to remind you. Divided into five sections that range from the political to the personal, Feel Free was written largely during the Obama years, meaning these essays are delightfully uneclipsed by the orange storm cloud that currently looms over America. Instead, Smith is free to focus her incisive and often wry lens on painting, novels, dance, history, technology, Mark Zuckerberg, Jay-Z, race, love, and the nature of joy itself. But make no mistake—these pieces are as relevant as can be. They are reminders of how much else there is to ponder in this world, how much else is worth our time, and how lucky we are to have Smith as our guide. As she says in her foreword, “Essays about one person’s affective experience have, by their very nature, not a leg to stand on. All they have is their freedom.”
Over land, over sea: In Thisbe Nissen’s Our Lady of the Prairie (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) a long-married and long-suffering midwestern mother is hit with a political, emotional, and literal tornado. And, completed only a few weeks before Denis Johnson’s death, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden (Random House) includes both familiar and new faces, each haunted by the specter of the past and each staring down that all-too-certain barrel of the future.
IN SHORT
Ronen Bergman aims for Israel’s assassination programs with Rise and Kill First (Random House). Francisco Cantú patrols the border in The Line Becomes a River (Riverhead). Egyptian entrepreneurs and Saudi saleswomen thrive in Saadia Zahidi’s Fifty Million Rising (Nation Books). Debut novelist Hermione Hoby avoids getting eaten alive by the city that never sleeps in Neon in Daylight (Catapult). Two scientists duke it out in Charles C. Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet (Knopf). Icelandic novelist Hallgrímur Helgason measures a Woman at 1,000 Degrees (Algonquin). John Leland’s observant octogenarians know that Happiness Is a Choice You Make (Sarah Crichton). Anjali Kumar hunts for the holy while Stalking God (Seal). Allegra Huston’s Say My Name (Mira) sells us on second acts. Nick Nolte is a Rebel (Morrow) without a pause. Kushanava Choudhury returns to the sights and scents of Calcutta in The Epic City (Bloomsbury). Simon Sebag Montefiore paints a Russian Western under the Red Sky at Noon (Pegasus). Paul Roth and Amanda Maddox inspect the impact of Gordon Parks (Steidl). Nazis get gnarled in Robert Harris’s Munich (Knopf). A former F.B.I. agent hunts for justice in Jonathan Ames’s You Were Never Really Here (Vintage). Novelist Jillian Medoff sends a companywide memo, reminding us that This Could Hurt (Harper).
