Reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction.  The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts, by Gregg Hecimovich (Ecco). In 2002, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., published an annotated edition of “The Bondswoman’s Narrative,” a novel thought to be the first written by an enslaved Black woman. Its author was unknown until Hecimovich traced the manuscript to Hannah Crafts, a mixed-race captive who was born in 1826. Crafts was likely the offspring of rape, her first captor having been her biological father. As she was passed from one household to the next, she was taught to read and exposed to popular literature. Alongside Crafts’s story, Hecimovich recounts the painstaking process of his research. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. American Visions, by Edward L. Ayers (Norton). This nimble history surveys the “visions” that Americans fashioned for the nation taking shape before them in the “lurching” period of 1800 to 1860. These ideals were expressed through literature, visual art, popular songs, political slogans, religious doctrines, and folk heroes. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. The Vulnerables, by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead). In this ruminative novel set during the COVID pandemic, the narrator, an intellectual living in New York, lends her apartment to a visiting pulmonologist and moves into one belonging to acquaintances who have decamped to a suburb, leaving behind their pet macaw. Her living arrangement is soon disrupted by the unannounced arrival of the previous bird-sitter, a college student. The narrator’s most unsettling experience takes place outside, when a man taunts her and coughs in her face, an event that underscores her “vulnerable” status. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. At Night He Lifts Weights, by Kang Young-sook, translated from the Korean by Janet Hong (Transit). These stories are populated by isolated characters who exist in crumbling worlds sometimes governed by the logic of dreams. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. What are you reading this week? Reply to let us know. | 
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