Reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction.  The Playbook, by James Shapiro (Penguin Press). This perceptive history, by a Shakespeare scholar, centers on the Federal Theatre, a short-lived New Deal-era relief program that staged more than a thousand plays and employed more than twelve thousand artists before it was disbanded for allegedly disseminating “Communist propaganda.” Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. I Cannot Control Everything Forever, by Emily C. Bloom (St. Martin’s). This remarkable memoir, which takes its title from a work by Louise Bourgeois, describes the author’s fraught journey to parenthood and considers pregnancy through the lenses of science and art. Bloom, a literary scholar, interweaves the narrative of becoming the mother of a diabetic and congenitally deaf daughter with analyses of art works and brief medical histories. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Vagabonds, by Oskar Jensen (The Experiment). Impoverished nineteenth-century Londoners tend to come to us in the form of caricature or literature; this engaging history seeks to allow them to speak for themselves. Jensen delves into contemporary memoirs, trial proceedings, periodicals, and other sources to capture an “astonishingly eloquent collective.” Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. The Invention of the Darling, by Li-Young Lee (Norton). “True love looks out / through death’s unswerving gaze,” proclaims the poem that opens this collection, from a writer renowned for his renderings of erotic and spiritual ecstasy, and for work that braids together dream, myth, and memory in unabashed pursuit of the sublime. For Lee, devotion is both shadowed and illuminated by a consciousness of mortality. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. What are you reading this week? Reply to let us know. | 
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