Reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction.  Picasso the Foreigner, by Annie Cohen-Solal, translated from the French by Sam Taylor (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Born in Málaga, Spain, in 1882, Pablo Picasso settled in France in 1904. Cohen-Solal’s biography illuminates Picasso’s paradoxical situation, in which the institutional forces “obsessed with the idea of a national cultural purity” viewed him with suspicion even as he was idolized by French galleries and critics. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Spoken Word, by Joshua Bennett (Knopf). This rich hybrid of memoir and history surveys the institutions that have shaped spoken-word poetry for the past five decades. Bookended with accounts of state-sponsored performances—the author’s own, alongside Lin-Manuel Miranda, at the White House, in 2009, and Amanda Gorman’s recitation at President Biden’s Inauguration, in 2021—the book also chronicles the mainstreaming, for better or worse, of a radical tradition. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. The Great Reclamation, by Rachel Heng (Riverhead). The reserved, thoughtful protagonist of this novel grows up amid the shifting political regimes of mid-twentieth-century Singapore, where he strives to balance his loyalty to the traditional life of his fishing village with the appeal of the modern future promised by the government. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. A Spell of Good Things, by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ (Knopf). Set in contemporary Nigeria, this novel of radical class divisions examines political and domestic abuse through the stories of Ẹniọlá, a boy from an impoverished family, and Wúràọlá, a wealthy young medical resident who is engaged to the son of an aspiring politician. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. What are you reading this week? Reply to let us know. | 
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