“Glitter and doom.” That phrase appears in the subtitle of one of the books we recommend this week (Guy Trebay’s memoir of 1970s New York, “Do Something”), but it also serves nicely as a catchall theme for the list as a whole, which sparkles darkly: a witty horror novel, an exciting debut story collection probing the scarier side of the human psyche, a novel about a man whose unresolved daddy issues leave him at loose ends. In nonfiction, we recommend a group biography of the women who challenged social strictures in 18th-century England (that one’s more glitter than doom), a serious study of the people who helped prop up Hitler and his genocidal reign (more doom than glitter) and a true-crime history about a high-society jewel thief. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
Mengestu’s brilliantly slippery and destabilized fourth novel centers on Mamush, a journalist in Paris who is supposed to spend Christmas with his wife and young son in the Virginia suburb where his Ethiopian immigrant mother lives; instead, he ends up in Chicago investigating the criminal record of the man he assumes is his father.
The stories in this striking debut collection tend toward the grimly surreal, with characters facing spiritual crises, random violence and meaningless work. Two or three of the stories are so good that they announce a genuine young talent, one who deftly palpates the dark areas of human psyches.
Doubleday | $28
Jones’s latest is a fun, self-aware horror romp about an awkward teenager who, after a monster infection, transforms into a bloodthirsty serial killer with a desire for revenge.
Trebay is a veteran of the style wars: Prior to joining this paper, he did stints as a handbag designer, a busboy at Max’s Kansas City, a model, and a reporter at The Village Voice, chronicling a lost New York that was as gritty as it was glamorous. Trebay knew everyone; this memoir is indeed a who’s-who of that vanished Gotham. But more than that, it’s a love letter to a city, a life and a family, and to beauty itself.
Knopf | $29
In this kaleidoscopic book, Evans — an acclaimed historian of the Nazi era, who has previously avoided a biographical approach — offers portraits of Hitler and the people around him in order to explore a central question: How did seemingly respectable citizens go from rejecting the democracy of the Weimar Republic to countenancing genocide?
Penguin Press | $35
It sounds like a scenario straight out of Old Hollywood: a suave cat-burglar who infiltrates 1920s New York society and robs the 1 percent of their valuables, offering solace and aspirin as needed. In fact, the tabloid fixture known as “the phantom” was one Arthur Barry, and Jobb’s delectably entertaining biography attempts to get at the man behind the folk hero.
Before Mary Wollstonecraft, Susan B. Anthony or Virginia Woolf, there were the Bluestockings, a loosely connected group of British women writers and thinkers who, as Gibson writes in this intimate social history, transgressed sexist conventions to educate themselves, produce books on a range of subjects and contribute their wit to some of England’s liveliest salons.
Read More: 7 New Books We Recommend This Week
