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Lynsey Addario, It’s What I Do
“You have two options when you approach a hostile checkpoint, and both are a gamble,” writes photographer Lynsey Addario. In March 2011 Addario was one of four journalists held captive for six days by government soldiers in Libya. She was stripped of her cameras and shoes: “The soldiers picked me up by my hands and feet and carried me away.” Initially inspired by the street photography of Sebastião Salgado, she was drawn into the dangerous profession of war photography after the 11 September attacks. Her years covering conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Darfur and Libya have yielded lasting images of ordinary people, especially of women and children, and earned her a 2009 Pulitzer Prize. A gripping and revealing memoir. (Penguin Press)
Kate Alcott, A Touch of Stardust
Alcott (the pseudonym for novelist Patricia O’Brien) serves up a fascinating slice of Hollywood, rich with details culled from film industry insiders. She opens her novel in December 1938, on the set of Gone With the Wind: “Atlanta was exploding right on schedule.” Julie Crawford, an aspiring screenwriter from Fort Wayne, Indiana, is late delivering a message to studio mogul David O Selznick. When he fires her, Andy, a studio executive, takes her under his wing. Soon the ingénue is working for the dazzling and outspoken movie star Carole Lombard. She sees Lombard calm the skittish Clark Gable. She witnesses their love affair and their marriage. Julie falls in love with Andy, who becomes increasingly worried about family members in Europe. When Germany invades Poland, Hollywood changes. And Lombard has the final word: “When we’re dead, Gone With the Wind will be going strong.” (Doubleday)
John Benditt, The Boatmaker
The boatmaker is a solitary, hard-drinking man with a family tragedy in his past, a gift for working with wood and a passionate nature. Benditt begins his story with a fevered dream in which the boatmaker is a boy of eight, visiting his older brother’s grave. A wolf with blue fur and green eyes then takes him on a far-flung journey. He wakes in the home of the woman he loves, determined to build a boat and sail away from remote Small Island, where his family has lived for generations. His journey through lust, drunkenness, rage, despair, the mysteries of money and love, of religious fervour and hatred, is mysterious and compelling. The boatmaker’s mastery of woodworking, and his ultimate mission, come at great expense. Benditt’s timely and haunting first novel has the profound impact of a parable. (Tin House)
Nick Hornby, Funny Girl
“Complete unknown walks in off the street, wows everyone at the audition, gets the job.” Barbara Parker, Miss Blackpool of 1964, gives back the crown just an hour after winning and heads to London, hoping to be the next Lucille Ball. She’s “pin-up sexy, all legs and bosoms and blonde hair”, which distracts from her comic talent until a team of writers take the time to listen to her quirky commentary. Renamed Sophie Straw, she is soon at the centre of a wildly successful BBC comedy show. Hornby knows TV comedies (a hit US TV series is based on his About a Boy) and film – he was the screenwriter for Wild, the film based on the Cheryl Strayed novel. Funny Girl captures a golden moment in TV history. (Riverhead)
Selected Letters of Langston Hughes
The genius of poet Hughes shines through in this “life in letters”, introduced by his biographer Arnold Rampersad, who notes his tone is by turns “lyrical, romantic, flirtatious, ironical, sardonic, allusive, casual, objective or businesslike”. Letters reveal his tempestuous relationships with Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin, his encouragement of younger writers Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks and Alice Walker (he published her first story), and his lasting vulnerability. In letters to poet Countee Cullen, Hughes details travels as a mess boy on a freighter bound for Africa in 1923 and, later, falling into “the whirling heart of Parisian night life”. Here, too, is his correspondence with Blanche Knopf, who gave him his first book contract, for The Weary Blues (1925). In his final letter to long-time friend Arna Bontemps, written in April 1967, the month before he died, he signs off, “Toujours”. (Knopf)
SM Hulse, Black River
This first novel pulses with dramatic tension and emotional resonance. Hulse opens the book with a woman’s last request, to be taken from Spokane, Washington, back to Black River in a Montana mountain valley. Her devoted husband Wes makes the trip with her ashes, reopening wounds from multiple layers of his past – his father’s suicide, his estrangement from his stepson Dennis and, central to it all, the sadistic torture he endured as a guard held hostage for 39 hours in a prison riot in 1992. Two other guards died. Hulse’s story is lyrical, elegiac and authentic. Watch for it on best-of-the-year lists. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Jeff Jarvis, Geeks Bearing Gifts
Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do? and Gutenberg the Geek, says his new book is the answer to the question he often hears: “So now that your damned, beloved internet has ruined news, what now?” He explores alternative futures, looking at how the emerging forms of journalism interact with the skills and core beliefs of the past. He affirms the rules of journalism – accuracy, fairness, completeness. At the core, he concludes, “We serve citizens and communities.” His section on the need for new and sustainable business models includes such pertinent examples as his own experience helping nonprofits develop a collaborative news ecosystem in his home state of New Jersey. Jarvis, who keeps his eye on the ever shifting digital world through his blog at Buzzmachine, is a smart observer and prognosticator, and his analysis is noteworthy. (CUNY Journalism Press/OR Books)
Kelly Link, Get in Trouble
The nine stories in Link's fourth collection (after Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners and Pretty Monsters) sizzle with surprises. Here are angry-faced sea monsters with poisonous claws and an unsettling summer house whose invisible inhabitants throw elaborate parties. I Can See Right Through You opens with the line “You will always be most famous for playing the lead in a series of vampire movies.” The story plays out over some 20 years. In The Lesson, inspired in part by the premature birth of Link’s own daughter, a surrogate mother gives birth at 24 weeks, while expectant parents Harper and Thanh are attending a bizarre wedding on a coastal island and out of contact. Two Houses,” an homage to Ray Bradbury, brings the question “What makes a haunted house?" to a new level as six astronauts aboard the spaceship House of Secrets tell ghost stories. Link is one of a kind. (Random House)
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall: The Stage Adaptation
Mike Poulton’s theatrical adaptation of Mantel’s Man Booker award-winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies will be a hot ticket on Broadway this spring. (Previews begin 20 March.) This book is irresistible for Wolf Hall fans. It includes the complete text of both plays, as well as Poulton’s introduction, which describes its evolution and intent: “Seeing events through Cromwell’s eyes was the prime requirement,” he writes. Mantel contributes illuminating notes on characters from Cromwell to the Calais Executioner. (Picador)
Matt Sumell, Making Nice
The talented Sumell infuses the 20 linked stories in his first collection with the full emotional range of grief. Alby, his narrator, is infuriating and touching by turn, a young man stripped raw by his mother’s death and tempted into misbehaviour at every turn, despite her admonition that he “make nice”. He punches his sister, gets bailed out of jail by his dad and confesses that he was the only one in the room when his mother died. “Me, I think of Time as teeny pieces of party confetti, so small it’s invisible, fluttering all over the place, all around us, it even goes up your nose if you breathe.” Inspired by his own mother’s death from cancer, which Sumell describes as “an event so large it divided time into before and after”, Making Nice introduces a writer who can be both tough and heartbreakingly tender. (Henry Holt)