The Week in Books – The New York Times

We take the weekend to highlight recent books coverage from The Times:

A tour of the book review:

It’s an honor to have Salman Rushdie reviewing on our cover this week, his first review for The Times since the 1990s, and it’s especially a thrill given his high praise for a debut novel. “The Old Drift,” by Namwali Serpell, is a multigenerational story set in Zambia, where the author was born,

Jennifer Senior, a former book critic and current opinion columnist for The Times, reviews Preet Bharara’s first book, “Doing Justice: A Prosecutor’s Thoughts on Crime, Punishment, and the Rule of Law.” Bharara is also a guest on this week’s Book Review podcast.

In “Foursome,” Carolyn Burke explores the two artist couples who helped found American Modernism: Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul Strand and Rebecca Salsbury. This comprehensive biography draws on newly-available correspondence between the four, with O’Keeffe emerging as the electric center.

And Howell Raines reviews “Bending Toward Justice,” a new memoir by Senator Doug Jones of Alabama, who discusses his role in the famous 1963 church-bombing case and his experience running for office in 2017. If Alabama has finally shed its past and come to grips with the modern age, Doug Jones may have had a lot to do with it.

We recommend 10 books to check out, and this week’s By the Book features Richard Powers,

Reviews from our critics

Dwight Garner also has high praise for “The Old Drift,” calling it “dazzling,” “an intimate, brainy, gleaming epic” that is “as ambitious as any first novel published this decade.”

In “Hattiesburg,” the historian William Sturkey tells the story of Jim Crow by focusing on the everday lives of the residents, black and white, of the Mississippi town. “Sturkey’s cleareyed and meticulous book pulls off a delicate balancing act,” Jen Szalai writes.

You might think it would be difficult to find someone who wants to make a movie out of a 700-page screenplay about the“mystical honeycombed interior” of Herman Melville’s mind. You would be right. Sarah Lyall reviews Yannick Haenel’s new novel, “Hold Fast Your Crown.”

In other news

Our writer sat down with Bret Easton Ellis — once seen as a literary bad boy and the voice of his generation. “White,” a new essay collection and his first book in nearly a decade, comes out in April. He’s calmed down, and wishes everyone else would, too: “The language police is a hard thing to deal with if you are creative.”

Damon Young, the co-founder of the cultural criticism website Very Smart Brothas mines his experiences in a new memoir, “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker.” He spoke with our reporter about everything from using humor as a coping strategy to the “absurdity” of “existing while black.” As he put it: “So much of the national dialogue about race deals with either terrible trauma or black excellence. I was more interested in the space in between, because that’s where I exist.”