Reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction.  The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride (Riverhead). This wily, gleefully clamorous novel opens in 1972, with the discovery of a skeleton in a well in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, but it largely unfolds three decades prior, with the events that led to the skeleton’s existence. Though the Black, Jewish, and newly arrived immigrant residents of the tumbledown Pottstown neighborhood of Chicken Hill have clashing ideas about America, they band together to protect a deaf Black boy from the state’s clutches. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. My Husband, by Maud Ventura, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan (HarperVia). Ventura’s protagonist, a forty-year-old English teacher and mother of two whose husband works in finance, is a comically exaggerated cliché whose sole concern is maintaining her husband’s interest. But, as the story progresses, the intensity of her fixation is contrasted with his profound indifference, and her vapid exterior is shown to mask desperate anxieties about class, gender, and power. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. The Philosopher of Palo Alto, by John Tinnell (Chicago). As the chief technology officer of Xerox parc, Mark Weiser believed that, instead of drawing people away from the world, devices should be embedded throughout our built environment, enhancing our perception rather than demanding our focus. Weiser’s pioneering ideas led to the present-day Internet of Things, but his vision lost out to the surveillance-capitalist imperatives of Big Tech. Tinnell’s profound biography evokes an alternative paradigm, in which technology companies did not seek to monitor and exploit users. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. The Great White Bard, by Farah Karim-Cooper (Viking). In this lively appraisal, a Shakespeare scholar reckons with her love of the playwright’s works while exploring their role in cultivating “a unique brand of English white superiority.” Karim-Cooper’s attentive readings show how beliefs about race reside in the language of the plays. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. What are you reading this week? Reply to let us know. | 
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