Jeanette Winterson, Christmas Days
Award-winning author Winterson’s celebration of the 12 Days of Christmas is a surprising and cheering addition to her work (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?). She gathers a dozen, sometimes eerie, holiday-themed stories, which range from otherworldly (country holidays with friends turn haunted) to magical (a glowing Christmas tree appears in the apartment of a New Yorker named Sam who has never celebrated the holiday). Winterson follows each with detailed instructions on how to make such traditional treats as mince pie (her mother’s specialty), her dad’s sherry trifle, her wife Susie Orbach’s Christmas Eve gravlax, and recipes from author friends, like Ruth Rendell’s red cabbage and Kamila Shamsie’s turkey biryani. A delectable read for long winter nights. (Credit: Grove Press)
Dava Sobel, The Glass Universe
Sobel begins her chronicle of pioneering women in astrophysics in 1882, when Anna Palmer Draper hosted a National Academy of Sciences dinner party. Her husband Henry was an astronomer credited with a method of classifying the stars, and she was his frequent assistant. When he died days later, Anna Draper funded a project at the Harvard Observatory to solidify her husband’s catalogue. She also created and funded a decades-long opportunity for women in the field. Working with the glass photographic plates their male colleagues used to capture images from the night sky, these “women with a knack for figures” calculated star positions, relative brightness, motion, and chemical content. The many luminaries Sobel profiles include Annie Jump Cannon (1896-1941), who devised Harvard’s stellar classification system and evaluated some half a million stars. (Credit: Viking)
Parisa Reza, The Gardens of Consolation
This illuminating and lyrical first novel by Iranian-born Reza, translated from the French by Adriana Hunter, won France’s Prix Senghor. Reza follows a young couple as they travel from their ancestral village of Ghamsar to Shemiran on the outskirts of Tehran in the early days of the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi. Their son Bahram becomes the first from his village to graduate from high school, and is admitted to university in Tehran. Reza tracks the massive changes of World War Two, when the Allies and Russia invaded oil-rich Iran, and the mid-century turmoil of the early Cold War and the coup against prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. She never loses track of her intimate focus on one family whose lives are shaped by love, loyalty, tradition, and the continual adjustments required as political power shifts. (Credit: Europa)
Leonardo Lucarelli, Mincemeat
Lucarelli begins working in kitchens as a 25-year-old paying his way through university. Early on, he begins “recklessly concocting insane desserts… like chocolate-and-eggplant strudel.” His goal is not to become a celebrity chef, but to indulge his passion for cooking and support himself. He works in small restaurants in Rome, Tuscany, the Veneto and Bologna. His wages are often weeks late and his ultimate salary uncertain. In his enthralling memoir, translated from the Italian by Lorena Rossi Gori and Danielle Rossi, he takes us through long, sensual after-hours escapades as well as the satisfactions of learning on the job and cooking up his own fantasies. Most revealing, perhaps, are his mistakes: underestimating his rivals, testing the power of the head chef, gossiping to people he shouldn’t have trusted, arrogance. “Life in the restaurant business was a constant battle,” he writes. “There is always a loser…” (Credit: Other Press)
Brian Jay Jones, George Lucas: A Life
As a film student at the University of Southern California in 1965, George Lucas was a rule-breaker. Influenced by cinema-vérité, he produced “visual tone poems” with potent sound tracks. His early days in Los Angeles were shaped by peers like Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg. In this engaging biography, Jones captures the bone-crushing work, the frustrations with film studio overlords and the near failures that resulted in ground-breaking films like American Graffiti and Star Wars (born of Lucas’s “love of comic books, fairy tales, and Saturday morning serials”). As he traces three decades of Star Wars and Indiana Jones trilogies, he shows Lucas as a man continuing to revolt against the rules, inventing his own merchandising approach and pioneering digital technology to maintain his artistic freedom. (Credit: Little, Brown)
Alex Beam, The Feud
Leading literary critic Edmund Wilson lent a hand to Vladimir Nabokov when he arrived in the US in 1940, assigning him reviews and introducing him to other editors. The two exchanged fond letters for some 25 years. But as Beam makes clear in this spirited account of a bitter if sometimes silly rivalry, their career trajectories shifted in the mid-1950s. Nabokov’s Lolita brought him international recognition and a goodly fortune, just as Wilson’s star was on the wane. In 1964 Nabokov published an idiosyncratic translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin with 930 pages of notes. The feud erupted when Wilson savaged the book in the New York Review of Books in “an overlong, spiteful, stochastically accurate, generally useless but unfailingly amusing hatchet job” that set the tone for “seven-plus years of malicious rhetoric.” (Credit: Pantheon)
Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women
This provocative essay collection from Hustvedt, whose novel The Blazing World was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, draws insights from both the sciences and the humanities. Her title comes from her first section, 11 essays on individual artists (Louise Bourgeois, Robert Mapplethorpe and Susan Sontag, among them), explorations of “the perceptual biases that affect how we judge art, literature, and the world in general” (including her on-stage interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard) and her personal experience with psychoanalysis (“doing analysis is something like making art,” she writes). The lengthy Delusions of Certainty section focuses on the mind/body split as perceived by thinkers from Descartes to Simone Weil to Stephen Pinker. She begins her concluding essays, which cover intriguing neurological disorders, with such questions as “What is a person, a self?” and “What is a mind?” (Credit: Simon and Schuster)
Lúcio Cardoso, Chronicle of the Murdered House
The setting and themes of this 1959 Brazilian novel by an author who was close to Clarice Lispector are “redolent of Faulkner”, writes Benjamin Moser in his introduction, “but its charm resides in the ways Lúcio marries those themes to what can only be called camp: as if Bette Davis had wandered, bewigged and in full makeup, into Yoknapatawpha.” His story, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Juli Costa and Robin Patterson, unfolds in a crumbling mansion in Minas Gerais, as the three remaining sons of the fading Meneses family – Valdo, Demetrio and Timoteo – struggle for dominance. The family’s secrets, many revolving around the arrival of Valdo’s seductive wife Nina, are revealed slowly through a series of documents – diaries, letters, confessions, and reports from the town doctor, pharmacist and priest. It’s a sensuous, bewitching tale, suspenseful to the last page. (Credit: Deep Vellum)
Banana Yoshimoto, Moshi Moshi
Yoshie’s father, a rock musician, has died in a “love murder-suicide”, lured to a forest and drugged by a woman she and her mother knew nothing about. After months of grieving with her mother, Yoshie moves to Shimokitazawa, finds an apartment and a job in a bistro. Then her mother shows up and says she is moving in because their Meguro condo is haunted by her late husband’s ghost. Yoshie dreams about her father and the cell phone he left behind the last time she saw him. She starts to fall for a musician who knew him. As this ghost story becomes a love story, best-selling Japanese author Yoshimoto’s buoyant tone and pleasurable descriptions, translated from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda, usher in Yoshie’s return to life. (Credit: Counterpoint)
Warren Ellis, Normal
Tech savvy Ellis’ new dystopian novel is a heart-pounding race through a digital nightmare. Adam, a futurist who has done legendary work on drones, has a meltdown in Namibia and finds himself flown to Normal Head, a mental asylum in a remote forested area in Oregon with no internet access. Each of his fellow futurist inmates seems to have walked through a worst-case scenario and ended shattered from gazing into the abyss. The morning after Adam arrives, another new patient disappears from his locked room, leaving behind a heaving pile of insects. Adam is suspect number one. And he also becomes the investigator, gathering an unlikely group of allies to take on a conspiracy that could destroy all that is “normal” in the pre-surveillance universe. Normal is crisply plotted and eerily timely. (Credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux)