Reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction.  The Backstreets, by Perhat Tursun, translated from the Uyghur by Darren Byler and Anonymous (Columbia). The narrator of this dark, existential novel—a startling literary document of urban alienation—is an Uyghur man roaming Urumqi in search of a room to rent. The author disappeared in 2018, presumably into one of China’s Xinjiang detention centers. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. The Magic Kingdom, by Russell Banks (Knopf). Harley Mann, the son of “educated White Northerners with an affection for abstract thought,” and the narrator of this slow-build tragic novel, recounts his youth and lovestruck early adulthood at New Bethany, the South Florida Shaker settlement where he moved with his siblings and widowed mother in 1902. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Well of Souls, by Kristina R. Gaddy (Norton). Tracing the development of the banjo, “a uniquely American instrument, crafted by people of African descent,” this meticulous history also illuminates the difficulties of unearthing a story rooted in the experiences of the enslaved. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Ted Kennedy, by John A. Farrell (Penguin Press). A sense of promise lost and regained imbues this biography of a figure whose long career encompassed the ascendancy of liberalism, its decline under Reagan, and the country’s descent into today’s partisanship. Kennedy continually reached across the aisle even as he saw the era of coalition-building come to an end. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. What are you reading this week? Reply to let us know. | 
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