Much more than a simple who’s who, Paul Freedman’s captivating social history “Ten Restaurants That Changed America” examines the cultural effects of culinary trends by profiling the restaurants that created them.
Fans of Leslie Jamison and Meghan Daum will love the mix of memoir, cultural commentary and exhaustive research in Belle Boggs’ “The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood.” Both soulful and informative, Boggs talks fertility treatments, adoption and surrogacy and explores the social isolation of infertility.
Books about geopolitics and technological upheavals are rarely optimistic, but luckily we have Thomas Friedman. In his most ambitious work since “The World Is Flat” the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner’s latest, “Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide To Thriving in the Age Of Acceleration,” discusses the confluence of Moore’s law and globalization, its impact on society and what we’re supposed to do about it.
If you read only one memoir/meta-fiction hybrid this year, make it Michelle Tea’s gritty dystopian novel “Black Wave.” Late ’90s Y2K hysteria meets San Francisco queer culture meets arrested development – and Matt Dillon? The main character, a writer named Michelle, moves to Los Angeles to get clean and works at a used-book store while waiting for doomsday. It couldn’t be more weird or wonderful
April Ayers Lawson’s highly-anticipated debut collection “Virgin and Other Stories” is weighty literary realism at its finest, with five stories that explore spiritual, emotional and sexual desire within a contemporary Southern backdrop.
Told through an enchanting communal voice, Brit Bennett’s lyrical coming-of -age novel “The Mothers” takes place in a tight-knit black community in Southern California, following three friends and the decisions they make that haunt them into adulthood.
