Reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction.  Cosmic Scholar, by John Szwed (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The Beat polymath Harry Smith bears some resemblance to the protagonist of Joseph Mitchell’s masterpiece “Joe Gould’s Secret.” But, whereas Gould’s life’s work turned out not to exist, this biography argues persuasively that Smith’s contributions to art, anthropology, avant-garde film, and, most of all, popular music were profound. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Up Home, by Ruth J. Simmons (Random House). In 2001, Simmons, a Romanticist by training, became the President of Brown University—and thus the first Black president of an Ivy League institution. Her memoir begins with her youth as one of twelve children born to sharecropper parents, and continues as she dwells on her encouraging teachers, and on the experiences that fuelled her fight against discrimination in higher education. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. The Caretaker, by Ron Rash (Doubleday). This immersive novel, set in Appalachia, explores the reverberations of a young man’s decision to elope with a teen-age hotel maid. The only son of a well-to-do family, Jacob is disinherited over the marriage, and soon afterward is conscripted to fight in Korea. He asks a friend, the caretaker of the town graveyard, to look after his wife. When news arrives that Jacob has been badly wounded, his parents plot to separate the married couple, but it is the lack of love in the caretaker’s life that shapes the novel most deeply. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Emergency, by Kathleen Alcott (Norton). “Nobody knows where I am,” one of the narrators in this collection of stories chants. She is in crisis after discovering evidence of her late mother’s secret past, but the line could plausibly be spoken by any of Alcott’s protagonists, who all find themselves pushing against expectations, wrestling with desire, and reckoning with ideas of who they are or should be. In supple, self-assured prose, Alcott highlights the ambivalence that can come with intimacy and violence, asking whether love is merely another form of circumscription, and whether brutality can sometimes be an antidote to numbness. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. What are you reading this week? Reply to let us know. | 
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