This vivid collection traces the creative evolution of Quiñones, who’s best known for his political graffiti in 1970s and ’80s New York City. In an introductory section, visual artist William Cordova notes that Quiñones saw subways and other public spaces as “platform[s] for ‘public address,’ ” where he could track people’s real-time reactions to his art. The collection showcases his 1979 “Stop the Bomb” subway car graffiti, such early drawings as 1977’s Jesus Christ Superstar (Heaven is Life Earth is Hell), and later gallery work that melded political messaging with futurist themes. Despite the hit-or-miss commentary from other artists interspersed throughout (Quiñones’s paintings “will forever ride high in the skyways like a shooting star racing as quick as a flash across the misty blanket of a New York night,” rhapsodizes Odili Donald Odita), the collection offers both an up-close view of the artist’s career and a window into a vibrant period of New York City art history. This captivates. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this wry debut from Tominaga, a Japanese woman navigates single parenthood after her American husband’s untimely death. Kyoko is visiting her parents in Japan with her 18-month-old son, Alex, when her husband, Levi, is crushed to death in their San Francisco garage by the antique car he was working on. Kyoko had stopped working after Alex was born, and she struggles to see how she’ll afford her life in San Francisco. She cuts down on her costs, finds work at a preschool, and receives emotional support from her blunt and loving mother-in-law, Bubbe. The women’s relationship forms the heart of the episodic narrative, which includes a visit to a psychic who claims Levi wasn’t happy with Kyoko. At one point, Kyoko suppresses the urge to tell Bubbe how little she misses Levi, thinking, “The greatest gift he gave me was the opportunity to raise Alex alone”; at another, Bubbe affectionately calls Kyoko her daughter, not her daughter-in-law. Tominaga depicts the women’s tensions, misunderstandings, and affection with refreshing honesty and piercing insights (“Regret, resentment, and shame would build a wall around you, [Bubbe] believed, and by telling the truth we would break the wall and unite”). Tominga impresses with this distinctive slice of life. (May)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this ambitious study, historian Sinha (The Slave’s Cause) traces Reconstruction’s ramifications beyond its span as official government policy from 1865 to 1877. She proposes that the 60-year period between Abraham Lincoln’s election and the ratification of the 19th Amendment comprised a singular and continuous battle between the forces of “interracial democracy” and “reactionary authoritarianism.” After emphasizing what a triumph for the democratic side of this battle the federal Reconstruction policy was—it secured civil rights for the formerly enslaved and enacted programs of land redistribution and public education—Sinha uncovers a fascinating array of the policy’s ideological ripple effects. Not only did Reconstruction inspire demands for more rights from early populist political movements—including the women’s movement and the labor movement—but it also provoked those opposed to these movements to adopt an “anti-government” political playbook similar to the one that eventually overthrew Reconstruction. For example, Sinha shows that activist homesteaders in Wisconsin, who wanted to seize Native land, used the same language to denigrate Native people as “dependent” on the government that was used to deride freedmen in the South. By 1920, Sinha writes, this anti-government ideology had become ascendent, forming the backbone of laissez-faire, anti-welfare federal policy. Her shrewdly argued study ties together many loose ends while providing propulsively narrated accounts of on-the-ground political violence and activism. It’s an all-encompassing new perspective on American history. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

Married writing duo Kelly and Tana Fireside tantalize in their third Owen Station queer romance (after Whiskey & Wine). Ambitious assistant fire chief Allison “Al” Jones is driven to succeed as a queer woman of color by her desire to inspire a younger generation to become firefighters. She’s job- and location-hopped repeatedly as she worked her way up the ladder, making it easy to avoid long-term romantic commitment. Now in tiny Owen Station, Ariz., where everyone knows everyone else’s business and conspiracy theories about local supernatural phenomena abound, she responds to a sinkhole in a residential area and meets Elena Murphy, a photographer, part-time mortuary worker, and occasional ghost whisperer, at the scene. An Owen Station native returning from a stint in Los Angeles, Elena initially butts heads with Al, who doesn’t buy into the supernatural. But when the women band together to solve a decades-old mystery, sparks fly. Readers will warm to Al, Elena, and the solid supporting cast, especially Elena’s feisty grandmother, who seems to know more about the mystery than she should. This quirky and tolerant small town remains a joy to visit. (May)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

Ex-cop Daniel Carter and his partner-in-violence Valentina “Tina” Hyde return in this blood-soaked urban fantasy. Having slaughtered the monster clans who ruled the criminal underworld and dispatched their creator Edward Hyde in 2021’s Jekyll & Hyde, Inc., Daniel and Tina, made unstoppably strong and nigh-indestructible through a special elixir, discover that aliens have long coveted Earth. With the monster clans gone, only Daniel and Tina remain to foil the aliens’ insidious agendas. The duo must track down and destroy the Greys, the Reptiloids, the Martians, and the Bug-Eyed Monsters who labor in secret to exploit and conquer the world, a quest which sees them contacting old friends for information and making strange new allies along the way. This second installment has an episodic feel, but it’s just as brutal, visceral, and bloody as the first, with Green’s protagonists coming across as every bit as monstrous as their opponents and twice as violent. The result is a fast-paced, adrenaline-fueled tale that’s reminiscent of grindhouse cinema and sure to satisfy series fans. Agent: Joshua Bilmes, JABberwocky Literary. (May)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

Retired CIA assassin Helen Warwick tracks down an old foe in Dees’s entertaining if far-fetched sequel to Second Shot. When a sniper nearly takes out her politician son at a campaign event, Helen recognizes the assassination attempt as the work of Scorpius, a Russian mole embedded in the CIA whom Helen thought she’d killed decades earlier. Her former bosses entice her to take over the agency’s “Scorpius-hunting team,” but warn her that Scorpius may have infiltrated the squad. Meanwhile, a string of young women across D.C. are being kidnapped, tortured, and murdered, and Helen tries to determine whether the crimes have anything to do with Scorpius. As in the previous installment, Dees keeps things brisk, with the middle-aged Helen ably stabbing, shooting, and outsmarting her foes at every turn. Certain plot developments strain credibility, but most readers will be having too much fun to care. This will hold special appeal for thriller fans of a certain age. Agent: Nicole Resciniti, Seymour Agency. (June)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this compact and characteristically biting denunciation of French hypocrisy from Céline (1894–1961), WWI soldier Ferdinand is plagued by a “horrific din bashing my head... like a train” after being wounded in battle. Stumbling around in a delirium, Ferdinand hallucinates dead friends, three of whom appear before him “completely armless... you could see daylight through his head... he had guts that were sliding from his ass far into the countryside.” Brought to convalesce in a hospital in the town of Peurdu-sur-la-Lys, Ferdinand is protected from a doctor who wants to operate on him by a necrophiliac nurse, and befriends a fellow convalescent whose attempt to put his girlfriend to work as a prostitute threatens to backfire. For the maimed and embittered Ferdinand, the real enemy is the French establishment, including his bourgeois parents. Céline fled France in 1944 to avoid being charged as a collaborationist and left this unedited manuscript behind; Mandell’s faithful translation preserves some of the peculiarities of the original, including a few character names that change over the course of the narrative. Céline’s furious style is in full force, and is well served by the brevity of the text. Devoted fans will rejoice. (June)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

Sestanovich's leisurely debut novel (after the collection Objects of Desire) traces the divergent paths of two friends from different socioeconomic strata. After college, middle-class Brooklynite Eva moves to Washington, D.C., where she hopes her “boring internship at an exciting newspaper” will lead to a real job. Though she's eventually hired as a researcher, her tasks remain rote and unsatisfying. In D.C., she reconnects and begins sleeping with her ambitious college boyfriend, Eli, but is similarly bored by details of his work for a U.S. senator. Eva's story plays out in counterpoint to that of her wealthy Upper East Side friend Jamie, who embraces the Occupy movement during college, refuses to accept money from his family, and joins a cult-like church in Brooklyn. By the end of the novel, Jamie's well-meaning desire for community, which drives him to purchase an abandoned warehouse where he illegally houses artists, leads to disaster. While readers hungry for plot and resolution may be left unsatisfied, Sestanovich captivates with her distinctive characterizations—including of Eva's parents, who offer Jamie financial support and show more interest in him than their daughter—and insights into the reverberating consequences of a gap between one's intentions and one's actions. The result is an intelligent exploration of lives in the making. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency. (June)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

Cartoonist Eckstein (Footnotes from the World’s Greatest Bookstores) explains that the 72 institutions included in his affectionate tour of North American museums are not intended as a definitive ranking (“Otherwise I would have taken into account the three things travelers are most interested in: the museum cafe, the gift shop, and the bathrooms”). Instead, the idiosyncrasy of his “most fascinating” criteria produces a charming juxtaposition of lauded (the Met; the Smithsonian) and obscure institutions (Boston’s Museum of Bad Art, which displays paintings plucked from the trash). While Eckstein’s ample facts occasionally strain for significance (the Whitney contains “New York City’s largest column-free exhibition spaces”), the book’s true strengths are its role as a kind of communal scrapbook, with piquant anecdotes relayed from others—like poet Sharon Messmer, who, recalling a break-up with a boyfriend at the Art Institute of Chicago, blames the museum’s proximity to bars—and Eckstein’s illustrations. Many of those, including a depiction of a gargantuan James Turrell light installation at Mass MoCA with minuscule humans crowded before it, communicate a sense of being dwarfed and stunned, suggesting such feelings stem from both great art and great museums’ showcasing of it. The result is a touching rumination on public art’s potential to provoke personal epiphany. (May)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

The war that brought independence to the world’s fourth-largest country plays out on a resonantly human scale in this captivating chronicle of the 1945–1949 Indonesian revolution. Historian Van Reybrouck (Congo) paints a rich portrait of a stratified pre-WWII colonial society in the Dutch East Indies, then recaps the upheavals that demolished Dutch authority: the Japanese occupation during WWII that destroyed the colonial administration while giving Indonesians experience in military resistance, the dramatic 1945 declaration of an independent republic, and the chaotic conflict that pitted young republican firebrands against Dutch and pro-Dutch Indonesian forces and later devolved into civil war among Islamist, communist, and nationalist Republican factions. Van Reybrouck’s sweeping narrative situates the revolution as the prototype for the rest of the 20th century’s decolonization struggles, but he keeps the focus on individual experiences gleaned from interviews with participants, bringing to life their youthful enthusiasm (“I was fourteen. I left with friends. That way I was able to get away from my mean stepmother too!”)and trauma (“They shot [my cousin] six times. In his right foot, his left foot, his right knee, his left knee, the right side of his chest, the left side of his chest”). The result is a vivid recreation of a watershed event in world history. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink