Sometimes lightning does strike the same place twice. Sometimes it strikes a whole bunch of times. In Orange Award winner Naomi Alderman’schilling The Power (Little, Brown), women across the globe discover a sudden ability to harness their aggression by inflicting electric shocks through their fingertips. Fans of speculative fiction (see also: Margaret Atwood and Ben Marcus) about empowered youth will be struck by Alderman’s speedy and thorough inhabitation of a world just different enough from ours to jolt the imagination. Mothers, lock up your boys.
Checking in? Here are your room keys: John Hodgman’s Vacationland(Viking) is a tour through the wilds of one’s 40s given by a man who once resembled “a bushy nineteenth-century president who also happened to be a baby.” Order room service and tuck into some emotional reading with beloved author Amy Tan’s marvelous memoir, Where the Past Begins(Ecco). Dine à la carte with The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick(New York Review Books), selected by Darryl Pinckney and brimming with bite. You’ll need the freight elevator for Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant,a collection of the illustrious writer-illustrator’s original pages (Fantagraphics). Take a look beyond your own balcony with Gold Star parent Khizr Khan’s patriotic and personal narrative of An American Family (Random House). Stay up all night partying with the narcos and rock stars of Roben Farzad’s Hotel Scarface (Berkley)—you can check out anytime, but you can never plead.
Dave Eggers draws on his inner animal in Ungrateful Mammals (Abrams). Politics get sketchy via cartoonist Barry Blitt’s eponymous Blitt(Riverhead). Walter Isaacson paints the scientific side of Leonardo da Vinci (Simon & Schuster). Melissa Rivers curates satisfyingly sardonic scribbles with Scott Currie in Joan Rivers Confidential (Abrams). Jonathan Alpeyrie focuses on Syria through The Shattered Lens (Atria), with Stash Luczkiw. The garden has gone to seed in Rosetta S. Elkin’sTiny Taxonomy (Actar). Government roots are ivy grown in Daniel Golden’sSpy Schools (Henry Holt). Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine (Doubleday) uncovers a 20th-century Ukraine under siege. Anthony DeCurtis digs underground with Lou Reed (Little, Brown). Alexandre de Betak relishes the runway in Betak (Phaidon). She (Abrams) exudes elegance, in a tribute from Kate Spade New York. Garry Wills probes piety with What the Qur’an Meant (Viking). V.F. contributing editor Rich Cohen knocks it out of the park for The Chicago Cubs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The American hero is hewn in Nancy Schoenberger’s Wayne and Ford (Nan A. Talese). Booze, drugs, and advertising out-vice one another in David Szalay’s London and the South-East (Graywolf). Richard Aldous’sSchlesinger (Norton) considers the man who crafted the J.F.K. legacy. David Yurman links up in David Yurman (Rizzoli). Harper’s habitués Ellen Rosenbush and Giulia Melucci Know That What You Eat You Are (Franklin Square). Syl Tang pulls the economic thread in Disrobed (Rowman & Littlefield). T.C. Boyle cracks open The Relive Box and Other Stories(Ecco). Mystery spirals in John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down(Dutton). The Met collects inspiration from the innovators in The Artist Project (Phaidon). Delightful detritus makes for Sad Stuff on the Street(Ammo), a bite-size book for charity from Todd Oldham, Greg Larson, and yours truly.
